rs, dark green and blotches of black-purple and bronze. But
she could feel their turgid fleshy structure as in a sensuous vision,
she KNEW how they rose out of the mud, she KNEW how they thrust out
from themselves, how they stood stiff and succulent against the air.

Ursula was watching the butterflies, of which there were dozens near
the water, little blue ones suddenly snapping out of nothingness into a
jewel-life, a large black-and-red one standing upon a flower and
breathing with his soft wings, intoxicatingly, breathing pure, ethereal
sunshine; two white ones wrestling in the low air; there was a halo
round them; ah, when they came tumbling nearer they were orangetips,
and it was the orange that had made the halo. Ursula rose and drifted
away, unconscious like the butterflies.

Gudrun, absorbed in a stupor of apprehension of surging water-plants,
sat crouched on the shoal, drawing, not looking up for a long time, and
then staring unconsciously, absorbedly at the rigid, naked, succulent
stems. Her feet were bare, her hat lay on the bank opposite.

She started out of her trance, hearing the knocking of oars. She looked
round. There was a boat with a gaudy Japanese parasol, and a man in
white, rowing. The woman was Hermione, and the man was Gerald. She knew
it instantly. And instantly she perished in the keen FRISSON of
anticipation, an electric vibration in her veins, intense, much more
intense than that which was always humming low in the atmosphere of
Beldover.

Gerald was her escape from the heavy slough of the pale, underworld,
automatic colliers. He started out of the mud. He was master. She saw
his back, the movement of his white loins. But not that--it was the
whiteness he seemed to enclose as he bent forwards, rowing. He seemed
to stoop to something. His glistening, whitish hair seemed like the
electricity of the sky.

'There's Gudrun,' came Hermione's voice floating distinct over the
water. 'We will go and speak to her. Do you mind?'

Gerald looked round and saw the girl standing by the water's edge,
looking at him. He pulled the boat towards her, magnetically, without
thinking of her. In his world, his conscious world, she was still
nobody. He knew that Hermione had a curious pleasure in treading down
all the social differences, at least apparently, and he left it to her.

'How do you do, Gudrun?' sang Hermione, using the Christian name in the
fashionable manner. 'What are you doing?'

'How do you