Nicholas had told me this in jerky sentences. But he was more than ever dogged in his determination to go on with it. He might have been putting on a hair shirt. “I think I was what you might call out of my head,” he concluded his estimate of his experience. “I’ve only the vaguest recollections of it. I was profoundly shocked, you see.” Careful, as always, to be accurate, he added: “I remember my feeling, and not the links in what I did. And, looking back on it, I lose the intensity of the feeling because no longer have I the intensity of the conviction that then animated me. I actually believed, you know, that----” He was silent for some time. “I can just recall going back into her study to tell her to go to bed. Her head had dropped on the arm of her chair, limp and with her hair hanging forlornly over the chintz. I remember how bright the colours of the chintz were; I daresay it was by comparison with her white face. She must have been very ill even then. I thought: ‘She’s trying to put it over on me.’ I went across the room and shook her arm. ‘Come, Eva. This argument is over. Closed.’ She didn’t reply. She had fainted. I stood there looking down at her. In her bids for publicity she had usually made a better show than this, I said to myself. I saw that the whiskey was still in the glass by her side, and forced enough down her throat to revive her.” He had made nothing of what she murmured when she came out of her fit of unconsciousness. She said: “Nick--help me! I feel so strangely----” As he resumed his pacing of the room, he had, he told me, glanced indifferently at her. She had put her hand to her head. “Nothing hurts, especially, but--” she looked puzzled--“I seemed to slip out----” “You would,” he told her, at once brought back to the life that she was leaving for his share--blank of all that he had hoped she would bring to him. She pushed her hair from her face. He remembered the time when he had liked to call her hair the wings of an angel. Staring at me with his tragic eyes, he said: “I know, now, that she looked like an angel always.” He went through to his own room. He could not breathe, and flung open the windows. It was nearly morning. The dawn was trying to get above the roofs of the city. In the cold half-light his drawing-board mocked him. Life, for him, would now go on, drably, in the half-light. Clutched by the frenzy that all night he had tried to conquer, he rushed back to Eva’s study and seized her by the arm. He dragged her into his room and up to the open window. “What do you want?” she cried in terror. “To show you something,” he said through his shut teeth. In these few minutes the dawn had progressed. Over the sky there was now a wash of faint apple-green. The sooty sparrows had begun to twitter. Another day stared at them.