‘Don’t think, don’t think,’ she said, taking his hands, and lifting them to her bosom. ‘It’s only how the day goes; and it has all, my one dear, happened scores and scores of times before—mother and child and friend—and lovers that are all these too, like us. We mustn’t cry out. Perhaps it was all before even we could speak—this sorrow came. Take all the hope and all the future: and then may come our chance.’ ‘What’s life to me now. You said the desire would come back; that I should shake myself free. I could if you would help me. I don’t know what you are or what your meaning is, only that I love you; care for nothing, wish for nothing but to see you and think of you. A flat, dull voice keeps saying that I have no right to be telling you all this. You will know best. I know I am nothing. I ask nothing. If we love one another, what is there else to say?’ ‘Nothing, nothing to say, except only good-bye. What could you tell me that I have not told myself over and over again? Reason’s gone. Thinking’s gone. Now I am only sure.’ She smiled shadowily. ‘What peace did _he_ find who couldn’t, perhaps, like you, face the last good-bye?’ They stood in utter solitude awhile in the evening gloom. The air was as still and cold as some grey unfathomable untraversed sea. Above them uncountable clouds drifted slowly across space. ‘Why do they all keep whispering together?’ he said in a low voice, with cowering face. ‘Oh if you knew, Grisel, how they have hemmed me in; how they have come pressing in through the narrow gate I left ajar. Only to mock and mislead. It’s all dark and unintelligible.’ He touched her hand, peering out of the shadows that seemed to him to be gathering between their faces. He drew her closer and touched her lips with his fingers. Her beauty seemed to his distorted senses to fill earth and sky. This, then, was the presence, the grave and lovely overshadowing dream whose surrender made life a torment, and death the near fold of an immortal, starry veil. She broke from him with a faint cry. And he found himself running and running, just as he had run that other night, with death instead of life for inspiration, towards his earthly home. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO He was utterly wearied, but he walked on for a long while with a dogged unglancing pertinacity and without looking behind him. Then he rested under the dew-sodden hedgeside and buried his face in his hands. Once, indeed, he did turn and grind his way back with hard uplifted face for many minutes, but at the meeting with an old woman who in the late dusk passed him unheeded on the road, he stopped again, and after standing awhile looking down upon the dust, trying to gather up the tangled threads of his thoughts, he once more set off homewards.