gregation with his soft and luminous eyes.
Then he added:

"_Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat_. When the insistent _I_ sleeps, only
then perhaps can the heart be truly awake, be really watchful. Then let
us send the insistent I to sleep, and let us keep it slumbering."

He half-smiled as he finished. There had been something slightly
whimsical about his final words, about his manner and himself when he
said them.

Silence and the fog, and Rosamund walking homewards with her hands deep
in her muff. All those bodies and minds and souls which had been in the
church had evaporated into the night. Mrs. Chetwinde and Esme Darlington
had wanted to speak to Rosamund, but she had slipped out of the church
quickly. She did not wish to talk to any one.

"_Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat_."

What an odd little turn, or twist, the preacher had given to the meaning
of those words! "Whenever you have to take some big decision between
two life courses, ask yourself, 'Which can I share?' and if you can only
share one, choose that."

Very slowly Rosamund walked on, bending a little above the big muff,
like one pulled forward by a weight of heavy thoughts. She turned a
corner. Presently she turned another corner and traversed a square,
which could not be seen to be a square. And then, quite suddenly, she
realized that she had not been thinking about her way home and that she
was lost in the impenetrable fog.

She stood still and listened. She heard nothing. Traffic seemed stopped
in this region. On her left there were three steps. She went up them and
was under the porch of a house. Light shone dully from within, and by it
she could just make out on the door the number "8." At least it seemed
to her that probably it was an "8." She hesitated, came down the steps,
and walked on. It was impossible to see the names of the streets and
squares. But presently she would come across a policeman. She went on
and on, but no policeman bulked shadowy against the background of night
and of the fog which at last seemed almost terrible to her.

Rosamund was not timid. She was constitutionally incapable of timidity.
Nor was she actively alarmed in a strong and definite way. But gradually
there seemed to permeate her a cold, almost numbing sensation of
loneliness and of desolation. For the first time in her life she felt
not merely alone but solitary, and not merely solitary but as if she
were condemned to be so by some power that was hostile to her