“We are like the gods up here. Down there I see the world, where Wang Li is.” Her mind did not admit the thought of others on the far side of the Lake. “Do the gods live for ever, and are they eternally happy?” she asked. Her thoughts were all of an immense duration of happiness in some illimitable space of light, with dim shapes of mountains and pavilions. But a shadow fell across her mind, an annihilating thought of a cessation, of a space of nothing, of her lover wilfully dissolving in emptiness, deliberately ceasing to be. At her question, a swift, stony chill seemed to pass across his face. “Your question has no relation to reality,” he coldly replied. “I know you think it,” she answered. “I see quite well that it is absurd. You have made me understand that life is relative and all that. But it is a queer thought for a woman in love. My brains have all gone, you see, because of it, and I—the I that is the living Lychnis, and this body—clamour to be recognized.” She had not spoken to him or to herself so boldly before, but the thought of what he was always calling the eternal, non-existing Lychnis, with no body for caresses, the Lychnis pre-existent in a state precedent to matter and intelligence and life, was not congenial to her. But was she ready for an alternative? At once her words presented their own meaning clearly to her mind, and she experienced a terror that she chose to find delicious. There he was, tall and brooding, near her in the gloom of the evening. She was ready to think of herself as having been seized, as captive to the masked, expressionless god. A gust of wind boomed in the roof of the hut. “It is chilly here,” she said. “Are we going away to-night to the forests in the south, where it is so warm?” He stood close to her, and her orchid-petal hands lay in his. She divined a formidable debate in his mind, and wished that she could have read the eyes that gazed past her through the window. If he did not take her to the forests.... If they stayed here.... This might become her bridal chamber. She let the thought take her fully, and in the face of reality looked through the window for an escape. There was only rain and frowning crags and the valley, and perhaps the shadow of a picture of someone far off who could have given her advice. The bridal chamber! She was happy as she was, after all, in a now that might as well be unending, and perhaps, if she was to be possessed by Yuan, it would have to be in the glow of that moment of assent in the rain-world, now somewhat past. He made no reply to her thoughts. With him it was crisis. He chose the flowering moment of desire to show his contempt for it. Most probably the moments of silence were an eternity of the anguish of renunciation. “Is anything the matter?” She caught some faint shadow of dismay on the strong mask of his visage. “Are you displeased?”