alk
suffused through him wonderfully.

'I'm SO glad if I help you,' she said.

'Yes,' he answered. 'There's nobody else could do it, if you wouldn't.'

'That is true,' she said to herself, with a thrill of strange, fatal
elation.

As they walked, he seemed to lift her nearer and nearer to himself,
till she moved upon the firm vehicle of his body.

He was so strong, so sustaining, and he could not be opposed. She
drifted along in a wonderful interfusion of physical motion, down the
dark, blowy hillside. Far across shone the little yellow lights of
Beldover, many of them, spread in a thick patch on another dark hill.
But he and she were walking in perfect, isolated darkness, outside the
world.

'But how much do you care for me!' came her voice, almost querulous.
'You see, I don't know, I don't understand!'

'How much!' His voice rang with a painful elation. 'I don't know
either--but everything.' He was startled by his own declaration. It was
true. So he stripped himself of every safeguard, in making this
admission to her. He cared everything for her--she was everything.

'But I can't believe it,' said her low voice, amazed, trembling. She
was trembling with doubt and exultance. This was the thing she wanted
to hear, only this. Yet now she heard it, heard the strange clapping
vibration of truth in his voice as he said it, she could not believe.
She could not believe--she did not believe. Yet she believed,
triumphantly, with fatal exultance.

'Why not?' he said. 'Why don't you believe it? It's true. It is true,
as we stand at this moment--' he stood still with her in the wind; 'I
care for nothing on earth, or in heaven, outside this spot where we
are. And it isn't my own presence I care about, it is all yours. I'd
sell my soul a hundred times--but I couldn't bear not to have you here.
I couldn't bear to be alone. My brain would burst. It is true.' He drew
her closer to him, with definite movement.

'No,' she murmured, afraid. Yet this was what she wanted. Why did she
so lose courage?

They resumed their strange walk. They were such strangers--and yet they
were so frightfully, unthinkably near. It was like a madness. Yet it
was what she wanted, it was what she wanted. They had descended the
hill, and now they were coming to the square arch where the road passed
under the colliery railway. The arch, Gudrun knew, had walls of squared
stone, mossy on one side with water that trickled down, dry on the
other side.