her. Every movement
made by the one was a reality and an adventure to the other.
They did not want outside excitements. They went to very few
theatres, they were often in their sitting-room high up over
Piccadilly, with windows open on two sides, and the door open on
to the balcony, looking over the Green Park, or down upon the
minute travelling of the traffic.

Then suddenly, looking at a sunset, she wanted to go. She
must be gone. She must be gone at once. And in two hours' time
they were at Charing Cross taking train for Paris. Paris was his
suggestion. She did not care where it was. The great joy was in
setting out. And for a few days she was happy in the novelty of
Paris.

Then, for some reason, she must call in Rouen on the way back
to London. He had an instinctive mistrust of her desire for the
place. But, perversely, she wanted to go there. It was as if she
wanted to try its effect upon her.

For the first time, in Rouen, he had a cold feeling of death;
not afraid of any other man, but of her. She seemed to leave
him. She followed after something that was not him. She did not
want him. The old streets, the cathedral, the age and the
monumental peace of the town took her away from him. She turned
to it as if to something she had forgotten, and wanted. This was
now the reality; this great stone cathedral slumbering there in
its mass, which knew no transience nor heard any denial. It was
majestic in its stability, its splendid absoluteness.

Her soul began to run by itself. He did not realize, nor did
she. Yet in Rouen he had the first deadly anguish, the first
sense of the death towards which they were wandering. And she
felt the first heavy yearning, heavy, heavy hopeless warning,
almost like a deep, uneasy sinking into apathy,
hopelessness.

They returned to London. But still they had two days. He
began to tremble, he grew feverish with the fear of her
departure. She had in her some fatal prescience, that made her
calm. What would be, would be.

He remained fairly easy, however, still in his state of
heightened glamour, till she had gone, and he had turned away
from St. Pancras, and sat on the tram-car going up Pimlico to
the "Angel", to Moorgate Street on Sunday evening.

Then the cold horror gradually soaked into him. He saw the
horror of the City Road, he realized the ghastly cold sordidness
of the tram-car in which he sat. Cold, stark, ashen sterility
had him surrounded. Where then was the lumin