The present peace that settled over him seemed the most valuable thing life had to offer; it was not like the end of effort, but resembled a welcome truce, a rest with his force unimpaired, from which he would wake to the tonic winter realities of tomorrow. An early train-- In the act of dropping, half asleep, into the position of slumber, he halted sharply, propped up on an elbow. A sense invaded him of something unusual, portentous, close by. There wasn't a sound, a flicker of audible movement, a break in the curtain of dark; yet he was breathless in a strained oppressive attention. It was impossible to say whether his disturbance came from within or without, whether it was in his pounding blood or in the room around him. Then he heard a soft thick settling rustle, the sound a fur coat might make falling to the floor; and, simultaneously, a vague slender whiteness appeared on the night. A swift conviction fastened on him that here he had been overtaken by fate; by what, for so long, he had invited. Out of the insubstantiality a whispering voice spoke to him: “Lee, where are you? It's so cold.” IV Twice, the following day, Lee telephoned to Fanny, but neither time was she in the house; and, kept at his office, he was obliged to take an inconvenient train that made a connection for Eastlake. When Lee reached the countryside opening in the familiar hilly vistas he had, in place of the usual calm recognitions through a run of hardly more than an hour, a sense of having come a long way to a scene from which he had been absent for years. It appeared to him remarkably tranquil and self-contained--safe was the word which came to him. He was glad to be there, but at indeterminate stations rather than in Eastlake. He dreaded, for no plainly comprehended reason, his return home. The feelings that, historically, he should have owned were all absent. Had it been possible he would have cancelled the past forty-eight hours; but Lee was forced to admit to himself that he was not invaded by a very lively sense of guilt. He made a conventional effort to see his act in the light of a grave fault--whatever was attached to the charge of adultery--but it failed before the conviction that the whole thing was sad. His sorrow was for Savina, for the suffering of her past, the ordeal of the present, and the future dreariness. There had been no suggestion of wrong in her surrender, no perceptible consciousness of shame: it was exactly as though, struggling to the limit of endurance against a powerful adverse current, she had turned and swept with it. The fact was that the entire situation was utterly different from the general social and moral conception of it; and Lee began to wonder which were stronger--the individual truth or the imposed dogmatic weight of the world. But the latter, he added, would know nothing of this. Concisely, there was to be no repetition of last night; there would be no affair.