attered lights in
the town beneath, and thought of Arthur and Susan, or Evelyn and Perrott
venturing out unwittingly, and by their happiness laying themselves
open to suffering such as this. How did they dare to love each other, he
wondered; how had he himself dared to live as he had lived, rapidly and
carelessly, passing from one thing to another, loving Rachel as he had
loved her? Never again would he feel secure; he would never believe in
the stability of life, or forget what depths of pain lie beneath small
happiness and feelings of content and safety. It seemed to him as he
looked back that their happiness had never been so great as his pain
was now. There had always been something imperfect in their happiness,
something they had wanted and had not been able to get. It had been
fragmentary and incomplete, because they were so young and had not known
what they were doing.

The light of his candle flickered over the boughs of a tree outside the
window, and as the branch swayed in the darkness there came before his
mind a picture of all the world that lay outside his window; he thought
of the immense river and the immense forest, the vast stretches of dry
earth and the plains of the sea that encircled the earth; from the sea
the sky rose steep and enormous, and the air washed profoundly between
the sky and the sea. How vast and dark it must be tonight, lying exposed
to the wind; and in all this great space it was curious to think how
few the towns were, and how small little rings of light, or single
glow-worms he figured them, scattered here and there, among the swelling
uncultivated folds of the world. And in those towns were little men and
women, tiny men and women. Oh, it was absurd, when one thought of it,
to sit here in a little room suffering and caring. What did anything
matter? Rachel, a tiny creature, lay ill beneath him, and here in his
little room he suffered on her account. The nearness of their bodies in
this vast universe, and the minuteness of their bodies, seemed to him
absurd and laughable. Nothing mattered, he repeated; they had no power,
no hope. He leant on the window-sill, thinking, until he almost forgot
the time and the place. Nevertheless, although he was convinced that
it was absurd and laughable, and that they were small and hopeless, he
never lost the sense that these thoughts somehow formed part of a life
which he and Rachel would live together.

Owing perhaps to the change of doctor, Rach