e a bird startled in its sleep creaked, flew on to
the next tree, and was silent again. The darkness poured down profusely,
and left them with scarcely any feeling of life, except that they were
standing there together in the darkness.

Chapter XXII

The darkness fell, but rose again, and as each day spread widely over
the earth and parted them from the strange day in the forest when they
had been forced to tell each other what they wanted, this wish of theirs
was revealed to other people, and in the process became slightly strange
to themselves. Apparently it was not anything unusual that had happened;
it was that they had become engaged to marry each other. The world,
which consisted for the most part of the hotel and the villa, expressed
itself glad on the whole that two people should marry, and allowed them
to see that they were not expected to take part in the work which has to
be done in order that the world shall go on, but might absent themselves
for a time. They were accordingly left alone until they felt the silence
as if, playing in a vast church, the door had been shut on them. They
were driven to walk alone, and sit alone, to visit secret places where
the flowers had never been picked and the trees were solitary. In
solitude they could express those beautiful but too vast desires which
were so oddly uncomfortable to the ears of other men and women--desires
for a world, such as their own world which contained two people seemed
to them to be, where people knew each other intimately and thus judged
each other by what was good, and never quarrelled, because that was
waste of time.

They would talk of such questions among books, or out in the sun,
or sitting in the shade of a tree undisturbed. They were no longer
embarrassed, or half-choked with meaning which could not express itself;
they were not afraid of each other, or, like travellers down a twisting
river, dazzled with sudden beauties when the corner is turned; the
unexpected happened, but even the ordinary was lovable, and in many
ways preferable to the ecstatic and mysterious, for it was refreshingly
solid, and called out effort, and effort under such circumstances was
not effort but delight.

While Rachel played the piano, Terence sat near her, engaged, as far
as the occasional writing of a word in pencil testified, in shaping
the world as it appeared to him now that he and Rachel were going to be
married. It was different certainly. The b