he said.

She wondered. Then her spirit came home to him, nestling unconscious in
him.

'Yes, it is good we are warm and together,' she said.

And they turned home again. They saw the golden lights of the hotel
glowing out in the night of snow-silence, small in the hollow, like a
cluster of yellow berries. It seemed like a bunch of sun-sparks, tiny
and orange in the midst of the snow-darkness. Behind, was a high shadow
of a peak, blotting out the stars, like a ghost.

They drew near to their home. They saw a man come from the dark
building, with a lighted lantern which swung golden, and made that his
dark feet walked in a halo of snow. He was a small, dark figure in the
darkened snow. He unlatched the door of an outhouse. A smell of cows,
hot, animal, almost like beef, came out on the heavily cold air. There
was a glimpse of two cattle in their dark stalls, then the door was
shut again, and not a chink of light showed. It had reminded Ursula
again of home, of the Marsh, of her childhood, and of the journey to
Brussels, and, strangely, of Anton Skrebensky.

Oh, God, could one bear it, this past which was gone down the abyss?
Could she bear, that it ever had been! She looked round this silent,
upper world of snow and stars and powerful cold. There was another
world, like views on a magic lantern; The Marsh, Cossethay, Ilkeston,
lit up with a common, unreal light. There was a shadowy unreal Ursula,
a whole shadow-play of an unreal life. It was as unreal, and
circumscribed, as a magic-lantern show. She wished the slides could all
be broken. She wished it could be gone for ever, like a lantern-slide
which was broken. She wanted to have no past. She wanted to have come
down from the slopes of heaven to this place, with Birkin, not to have
toiled out of the murk of her childhood and her upbringing, slowly, all
soiled. She felt that memory was a dirty trick played upon her. What
was this decree, that she should 'remember'! Why not a bath of pure
oblivion, a new birth, without any recollections or blemish of a past
life. She was with Birkin, she had just come into life, here in the
high snow, against the stars. What had she to do with parents and
antecedents? She knew herself new and unbegotten, she had no father, no
mother, no anterior connections, she was herself, pure and silvery, she
belonged only to the oneness with Birkin, a oneness that struck deeper
notes, sounding into the heart of the universe, the heart of realit