unutterably bitter, it made her that he rejected her sacrifice! Life
ahead looked dead, as if the glow were gone out. She bowed her face over
the flowers--the freesias so sweet and spring-like, the scarlet anemones
flaunting over the table. It was like him to have those flowers.

He moved about the room with a certain sureness of touch, swift and
relentless and quiet. She knew she could not cope with him. He would
escape like a weasel out of her hands. Yet without him her life would
trail on lifeless. Brooding, she touched the flowers.

"Have them!" he said; and he took them out of the jar, dripping as they
were, and went quickly into the kitchen. She waited for him, took the
flowers, and they went out together, he talking, she feeling dead.

She was going from him now. In her misery she leaned against him as they
sat on the car. He was unresponsive. Where would he go? What would
be the end of him? She could not bear it, the vacant feeling where he
should be. He was so foolish, so wasteful, never at peace with himself.
And now where would he go? And what did he care that he wasted her? He
had no religion; it was all for the moment's attraction that he cared,
nothing else, nothing deeper. Well, she would wait and see how it turned
out with him. When he had had enough he would give in and come to her.

He shook hands and left her at the door of her cousin's house. When he
turned away he felt the last hold for him had gone. The town, as he sat
upon the car, stretched away over the bay of railway, a level fume of
lights. Beyond the town the country, little smouldering spots for
more towns--the sea--the night--on and on! And he had no place in it!
Whatever spot he stood on, there he stood alone. From his breast,
from his mouth, sprang the endless space, and it was there behind him,
everywhere. The people hurrying along the streets offered no obstruction
to the void in which he found himself. They were small shadows whose
footsteps and voices could be heard, but in each of them the same night,
the same silence. He got off the car. In the country all was dead
still. Little stars shone high up; little stars spread far away in the
flood-waters, a firmament below. Everywhere the vastness and terror of
the immense night which is roused and stirred for a brief while by
the day, but which returns, and will remain at last eternal, holding
everything in its silence and its living gloom. There was no Time, only
Space. Who could say