.

And in the roaring circle under the tree, that was almost
invisible yet whose powerful presence received them, they lay a
moment looking at the twinkling lights on the darkness opposite,
saw the sweeping brand of a train past the edge of their
darkened field.

Then he turned and kissed her, and she waited for him. The
pain to her was the pain she wanted, the agony was the agony she
wanted. She was caught up, entangled in the powerful vibration
of the night. The man, what was he?--a dark, powerful
vibration that encompassed her. She passed away as on a dark
wind, far, far away, into the pristine darkness of paradise,
into the original immortality. She entered the dark fields of
immortality.

When she rose, she felt strangely free, strong. She was not
ashamed,--why should she be? He was walking beside her, the
man who had been with her. She had taken him, they had been
together. Whither they had gone, she did not know. But it was as
if she had received another nature. She belonged to the eternal,
changeless place into which they had leapt together.

Her soul was sure and indifferent of the opinion of the world
of artificial light. As they went up the steps of the
foot-bridge over the railway, and met the train-passengers, she
felt herself belonging to another world, she walked past them
immune, a whole darkness dividing her from them. When she went
into the lighted dining-room at home, she was impervious to the
lights and the eyes of her parents. Her everyday self was just
the same. She merely had another, stronger self that knew the
darkness.

This curious separate strength, that existed in darkness and
pride of night, never forsook her. She had never been more
herself. It could not occur to her that anybody, not even the
young man of the world, Skrebensky, should have anything at all
to do with her permanent self. As for her temporal, social self,
she let it look after itself.

Her whole soul was implicated with Skrebensky--not the
young man of the world, but the undifferentiated man he was. She
was perfectly sure of herself, perfectly strong, stronger than
all the world. The world was not strong--she was strong.
The world existed only in a secondary sense:--she existed
supremely.

She continued at college, in her ordinary routine, merely as
a cover to her dark, powerful under-life. The fact of herself,
and with her Skrebensky, was so powerful, that she took rest in
the other. She went to college in the