e sunlight the hired landau drove up to the
gate. Lawford, peeping between the blinds, looked down on the coachman,
with reins hanging loosely from his red squat-thumbed hand, seated in
his tight livery and indescribable hat on the faded cushions. One thing
only was in his mind; and it was almost with an audible cry that he
turned towards the figure that edged, white and trembling, into the
chill room, to fling herself into his arms. 'Don't look at me,' he
begged her, 'only remember, dearest, I would rather have died down
there and been never seen again than have given you pain. Run--run, your
mother's calling. Write to me, think of me; good-bye!'

He threw himself on the bed and lay there till evening--till the door
had shut gently behind the last rat to leave the sinking ship. All
the clearness, the calmness were gone again. Round and round in dizzy
sickening flare and clatter his thoughts whirled. Contempt, fear,
loathing, blasphemy, laughter, longing: there was no end. Death was no
end. There was no meaning, no refuge, no hope, no possible peace. To
give up was to go to perdition: to go forward was to go mad. And even
madness--he sat up with trembling lips in the twilight--madness itself
was only a state, only a state. You might be bereaved, and the pain
and hopelessness of that would pass. You might be cast out, betrayed,
deserted, and still be you, still find solitude lovely and in a brave
face a friend. But madness!--it surged in on him with all the clearness
and emptiness of a dream. And he sat quite still, his hand clutching the
bedclothes, his head askew, waiting for the sound of footsteps, for the
presences and the voices that have their thin-walled dwelling beneath
the shallow crust of consciousness.

Inky blackness drifted up in wisps, in smoke before his eyes; he was
powerless to move, to cry out. There was no room to turn; no air to
breathe. And yet there was a low, continuous, never-varying stir as of
an enormous wheel whirling in the gloom. Countless infinitesimal faces
arched like glimmering pebbles the huge dim-coloured vault above his
head. He heard a voice above the monstrous rustling of the wheel,
clamouring, calling him back. He was hastening headlong, muttering to
himself his own flat meaningless name, like a child repeating as he runs
his errand. And then as if in a charmed cold pool he awoke and opened
his eyes again on the gathering darkness of the great bedroom, and heard
a quick, importunat