people felt as if this catastrophe
had happened directly to themselves, indeed they were more shocked and
frightened than if their own men had been killed. Such a tragedy in
Shortlands, the high home of the district! One of the young mistresses,
persisting in dancing on the cabin roof of the launch, wilful young
madam, drowned in the midst of the festival, with the young doctor!
Everywhere on the Sunday morning, the colliers wandered about,
discussing the calamity. At all the Sunday dinners of the people, there
seemed a strange presence. It was as if the angel of death were very
near, there was a sense of the supernatural in the air. The men had
excited, startled faces, the women looked solemn, some of them had been
crying. The children enjoyed the excitement at first. There was an
intensity in the air, almost magical. Did all enjoy it? Did all enjoy
the thrill?

Gudrun had wild ideas of rushing to comfort Gerald. She was thinking
all the time of the perfect comforting, reassuring thing to say to him.
She was shocked and frightened, but she put that away, thinking of how
she should deport herself with Gerald: act her part. That was the real
thrill: how she should act her part.

Ursula was deeply and passionately in love with Birkin, and she was
capable of nothing. She was perfectly callous about all the talk of the
accident, but her estranged air looked like trouble. She merely sat by
herself, whenever she could, and longed to see him again. She wanted
him to come to the house,--she would not have it otherwise, he must
come at once. She was waiting for him. She stayed indoors all day,
waiting for him to knock at the door. Every minute, she glanced
automatically at the window. He would be there.

CHAPTER XV.

SUNDAY EVENING

As the day wore on, the life-blood seemed to ebb away from Ursula, and
within the emptiness a heavy despair gathered. Her passion seemed to
bleed to death, and there was nothing. She sat suspended in a state of
complete nullity, harder to bear than death.

'Unless something happens,' she said to herself, in the perfect
lucidity of final suffering, 'I shall die. I am at the end of my line
of life.'

She sat crushed and obliterated in a darkness that was the border of
death. She realised how all her life she had been drawing nearer and
nearer to this brink, where there was no beyond, from which one had to
leap like Sappho into the unknown. The knowledge of the imminence of
death was