shadow-gleam. He was beautiful,
far-off, and perfected. They would never be together. Ah, this awful,
inhuman distance which would always be interposed between her and the
other being!

There was nothing to do but to lie still and endure. She felt an
overwhelming tenderness for him, and a dark, under-stirring of jealous
hatred, that he should lie so perfect and immune, in an other-world,
whilst she was tormented with violent wakefulness, cast out in the
outer darkness.

She lay in intense and vivid consciousness, an exhausting
superconsciousness. The church clock struck the hours, it seemed to
her, in quick succession. She heard them distinctly in the tension of
her vivid consciousness. And he slept as if time were one moment,
unchanging and unmoving.

She was exhausted, wearied. Yet she must continue in this state of
violent active superconsciousness. She was conscious of everything--her
childhood, her girlhood, all the forgotten incidents, all the
unrealised influences and all the happenings she had not understood,
pertaining to herself, to her family, to her friends, her lovers, her
acquaintances, everybody. It was as if she drew a glittering rope of
knowledge out of the sea of darkness, drew and drew and drew it out of
the fathomless depths of the past, and still it did not come to an end,
there was no end to it, she must haul and haul at the rope of
glittering consciousness, pull it out phosphorescent from the endless
depths of the unconsciousness, till she was weary, aching, exhausted,
and fit to break, and yet she had not done.

Ah, if only she might wake him! She turned uneasily. When could she
rouse him and send him away? When could she disturb him? And she
relapsed into her activity of automatic consciousness, that would never
end.

But the time was drawing near when she could wake him. It was like a
release. The clock had struck four, outside in the night. Thank God the
night had passed almost away. At five he must go, and she would be
released. Then she could relax and fill her own place. Now she was
driven up against his perfect sleeping motion like a knife white-hot on
a grindstone. There was something monstrous about him, about his
juxtaposition against her.

The last hour was the longest. And yet, at last it passed. Her heart
leapt with relief--yes, there was the slow, strong stroke of the church
clock--at last, after this night of eternity. She waited to catch each
slow, fatal reverberation. 'T