his
laughing, insidious grace. They all loved him, he was kin to
them. His raillery, his warm, voluptuous mocking presence was
meat and joy to the Brangwen household. For this house was
always quivering with darkness, they put off their puppet form
when they came home, to lie and drowse in the sun.

There was a sense of freedom amongst them all, of the
undercurrent of darkness among them all. Yet here, at home,
Ursula resented it. It became distasteful to her. And she knew
that if they understood the real relationship between her and
Skrebensky, her parents, her father in particular, would go mad
with rage. So subtly, she seemed to be like any other girl who
is more or less courted by a man. And she was like any other
girl. But in her, the antagonism to the social imposition was
for the time complete and final.

She waited, every moment of the day, for his next kiss. She
admitted it to herself in shame and bliss. Almost consciously,
she waited. He waited, but, until the time came, more
unconsciously. When the time came that he should kiss her again,
a prevention was an annihilation to him. He felt his flesh go
grey, he was heavy with a corpse-like inanition, he did not
exist, if the time passed unfulfilled.

He came to her finally in a superb consummation. It was very
dark, and again a windy, heavy night. They had come down the
lane towards Beldover, down to the valley. They were at the end
of their kisses, and there was the silence between them. They
stood as at the edge of a cliff, with a great darkness
beneath.

Coming out of the lane along the darkness, with the dark
space spreading down to the wind, and the twinkling lights of
the station below, the far-off windy chuff of a shunting train,
the tiny clink-clink-clink of the wagons blown between the wind,
the light of Beldover-edge twinkling upon the blackness of the
hill opposite, the glow of the furnaces along the railway to the
right, their steps began to falter. They would soon come out of
the darkness into the lights. It was like turning back. It was
unfulfilment. Two quivering, unwilling creatures, they lingered
on the edge of the darkness, peering out at the lights and the
machine-glimmer beyond. They could not turn back to the
world--they could not.

So lingering along, they came to a great oak tree by the
path. In all its budding mass it roared to the wind, and its
trunk vibrated in every fibre, powerful, indomitable.

"We will sit down," he said