“Why me?” he said, touching her cheeks delicately with the tips of his fingers. The touch had an almost hypnotizing effect on her. He went away upstairs. She saw him mount into the darkness, unseeing and unchanging. He did not know that the lamps on the upper corridor were unlighted. He went on into the darkness with unchanging step. She heard him in the bathroom. Pervin moved about almost unconsciously in his familiar surroundings, dark though everything was. He seemed to know the presence of objects before he touched them. It was a pleasure to him to rock thus through a world of things, carried on the flood in a sort of blood-prescience. He did not think much or trouble much. So long as he kept this sheer immediacy of blood-contact with the substantial world he was happy, he wanted no intervention of visual consciousness. In this state there was a certain rich positivity, bordering sometimes on rapture. Life seemed to move in him like a tide lapping, and advancing, enveloping all things darkly. It was a pleasure to stretch forth the hand and meet the unseen object, clasp it, and possess it in pure contact. He did not try to remember, to visualize. He did not want to. The new way of consciousness substituted itself in him. The rich suffusion of this state generally kept him happy, reaching its culmination in the consuming passion for his wife. But at times the flow would seem to be checked and thrown back. Then it would beat inside him like a tangled sea, and he was tortured in the shattered chaos of his own blood. He grew to dread this arrest, this throw-back, this chaos inside himself, when he seemed merely at the mercy of his own powerful and conflicting elements. How to get some measure of control or surety, this was the question. And when the question rose maddening in him, he would clench his fists as if he would _compel_ the whole universe to submit to him. But it was in vain. He could not even compel himself. Tonight, however, he was still serene, though little tremors of unreasonable exasperation ran through him. He had to handle the razor very carefully, as he shaved, for it was not at one with him, he was afraid of it. His hearing also was too much sharpened. He heard the woman lighting the lamps on the corridor, and attending to the fire in the visitor’s room. And then, as he went to his room he heard the trap arrive. Then came Isabel’s voice, lifted and calling, like a bell ringing: “Is it you, Bertie? Have you come?” And a man’s voice answered out of the wind: “Hello, Isabel! There you are.” “Have you had a miserable drive? I’m so sorry we couldn’t send a closed carriage. I can’t see you at all, you know.” “I’m coming. No, I liked the drive—it was like Perthshire. Well, how are you? You’re looking fit as ever, as far as I can see.” “Oh, yes,” said Isabel. “I’m wonderfully well. How are you? Rather thin, I think—” “Worked to death—everybody’s old cry. But I’m all right, Ciss. How’s Pervin?—isn’t he here?”