tole through her!
Closer and closer she pressed, not quite knowing what she did, not quite
knowing anything but that she wanted him never to let her go; wanted his
lips on hers, so that she might feel his spirit pass, away from what was
haunting it, into hers, never to escape. But his lips did not come to
hers. They stayed drawn back, trembling, hungry-looking, just above her
lips. And she whispered:

"Kiss me!"

She felt him shudder in her arms, saw his eyes darken, his lips quiver
and quiver, as if he wanted them to, but they would not. What was it?
Oh, what was it? Wasn't he going to kiss her--not to kiss her? And while
in that unnatural pause they stood, their heads bent back among the
moongleams and those willow shadows, there passed through Nedda such
strange trouble as she had never known. Not kiss her! Not kiss her! Why
didn't he? When in her blood and in the night all round, in the feel
of his arms, the sight of his hungry lips, was something unknown,
wonderful, terrifying, sweet! And she wailed out:

"I want you--I don't care--I want you!" She felt him sway, reel, and
clutch her as if he were going to fall, and all other feeling vanished
in the instinct of the nurse she had already been to him. He was ill
again! Yes, he was ill! And she said:

"Derek--don't! It's all right. Let's walk on quietly!"

She got his arm tightly in hers and drew him along toward home. By the
jerking of that arm, the taut look on his face, she could feel that he
did not know from step to step whether he could stay upright. But she
herself was steady and calm enough, bent on keeping emotion away, and
somehow getting him back along the river-path, abandoned now to the moon
and the bright, still spaces of the night and the slow-moving, whitened
water. Why had she not felt from the first that he was overwrought and
only fit for bed?

Thus, very slowly, they made their way up by the factory again into
the lane by the church magnate's garden, under the branches of the
sycamores, past the same white-faced old house at the corner, to the
high street where some few people were still abroad.

At the front door of the hotel stood Felix, looking at his watch,
disconsolate as an old hen. To her great relief he went in quickly
when he saw them coming. She could not bear the thought of talk and
explanation. The one thing was to get Derek to bed. All the time he had
gone along with that taut face; and now, when he sat down on the shiny
sofa