s.

This was all--no cupboard, none of the amenities of life. Here they
were shut up together in this cell of golden-coloured wood, with two
blue checked beds. They looked at each other and laughed, frightened by
this naked nearness of isolation.

A man knocked and came in with the luggage. He was a sturdy fellow with
flattish cheek-bones, rather pale, and with coarse fair moustache.
Gudrun watched him put down the bags, in silence, then tramp heavily
out.

'It isn't too rough, is it?' Gerald asked.

The bedroom was not very warm, and she shivered slightly.

'It is wonderful,' she equivocated. 'Look at the colour of this
panelling--it's wonderful, like being inside a nut.'

He was standing watching her, feeling his short-cut moustache, leaning
back slightly and watching her with his keen, undaunted eyes, dominated
by the constant passion, that was like a doom upon him.

She went and crouched down in front of the window, curious.

'Oh, but this--!' she cried involuntarily, almost in pain.

In front was a valley shut in under the sky, the last huge slopes of
snow and black rock, and at the end, like the navel of the earth, a
white-folded wall, and two peaks glimmering in the late light. Straight
in front ran the cradle of silent snow, between the great slopes that
were fringed with a little roughness of pine-trees, like hair, round
the base. But the cradle of snow ran on to the eternal closing-in,
where the walls of snow and rock rose impenetrable, and the mountain
peaks above were in heaven immediate. This was the centre, the knot,
the navel of the world, where the earth belonged to the skies, pure,
unapproachable, impassable.

It filled Gudrun with a strange rapture. She crouched in front of the
window, clenching her face in her hands, in a sort of trance. At last
she had arrived, she had reached her place. Here at last she folded her
venture and settled down like a crystal in the navel of snow, and was
gone.

Gerald bent above her and was looking out over her shoulder. Already he
felt he was alone. She was gone. She was completely gone, and there was
icy vapour round his heart. He saw the blind valley, the great
cul-de-sac of snow and mountain peaks, under the heaven. And there was
no way out. The terrible silence and cold and the glamorous whiteness
of the dusk wrapped him round, and she remained crouching before the
window, as at a shrine, a shadow.

'Do you like it?' he asked, in a voice that sounded