Falk did not sleep at all that night. This was only one of many sleepless nights, but it was the worst of them. The night was warm, and a faint dim colour lingered behind the treetops of the garden beyond his open window. First he lay under the clothes, then upon the top of his bed, then stripped, plunging his head into a basin of water, then naked save for his soft bedroom slippers, paced his room...His head was a flaming fire. The pale light seemed for an instant to vanish, and the world was dark and silent. Then, at the striking of the Cathedral clock, as though it were a signal upon some stage, the light slowly crept back again, growing ever stronger and stronger. The birds began to twitter; a cock crew. A bar of golden light broken by the squares and patterns of the dark trees struck the air. The shock of his mother's announcement had been terrific. It was not only the surprise of it, it was the sudden light that it flung upon his own case. He had gone, during these last weeks, so far with Annie Hogg that it was hard indeed to see how there could be any stepping back. They had achieved a strange relationship together: one not of comradeship, nor of lust, nor of desire, nor of affection, having a little of all these things but not much of any of them, and finally resembling the case of two strangers, shipwrecked, hanging on to a floating spar of wood that might bring them into safety. She was miserable; he was miserable; whether she cared for him he could not tell, nor whether he cared for her. The excitement that she created in him was intense, all-devouring, but it was not an excitement of lust. He had never done more than kiss her, and he was quite ready that it should remain so. He intended, perhaps, to marry her, but of that he could not be sure.