will you stay?”

“While the sunset lasts.”

She went to the fence and sat there, watching the gold clouds fall to pieces, and go in immense, rose-coloured ruin towards the darkness. Gold flamed to scarlet, like pain in its intense brightness. Then the scarlet sank to rose, and rose to crimson, and quickly the passion went out of the sky. All the world was dark grey. Paul scrambled quickly down with his basket, tearing his shirt-sleeve as he did so.

“They are lovely,” said Miriam, fingering the cherries.

“I’ve torn my sleeve,” he answered.

She took the three-cornered rip, saying:

“I shall have to mend it.” It was near the shoulder. She put her fingers through the tear. “How warm!” she said.

He laughed. There was a new, strange note in his voice, one that made her pant.

“Shall we stay out?” he said.

“Won’t it rain?” she asked.

“No, let us walk a little way.”

They went down the fields and into the thick plantation of fir-trees and pines.

“Shall we go in among the trees?” he asked.

“Do you want to?”

“Yes.”

It was very dark among the firs, and the sharp spines pricked her face. She was afraid. Paul was silent and strange.

“I like the darkness,” he said. “I wish it were thicker—good, thick darkness.”

He seemed to be almost unaware of her as a person: she was only to him then a woman. She was afraid.

He stood against a pine-tree trunk and took her in his arms. She relinquished herself to him, but it was a sacrifice in which she felt something of horror. This thick-voiced, oblivious man was a stranger to her.

Later it began to rain. The pine-trees smelled very strong. Paul lay with his head on the ground, on the dead pine needles, listening to the sharp hiss of the rain—a steady, keen noise. His heart was down, very heavy. Now he realised that she had not been with him all the time, that her soul had stood apart, in a sort of horror. He was physically at rest, but no more. Very dreary at heart, very sad, and very tender, his fingers wandered over her face pitifully. Now again she loved him deeply. He was tender and beautiful.

“The rain!” he said.

“Yes—is it coming on you?”

She put her hands over him, on his hair, on his shoulders, to feel if the raindrops fell on him. She loved him dearly. He, as he lay with his face on the dead pine-leaves, felt extraordinarily quiet. He did not mind if the raindrops came on him: he would have lain and got wet through: he felt as if nothing mattered, as if his living were smeared away into the beyond, near and quite lovable. This strange, gentle reaching-out to death was new to him.

“We must go,” said Miriam.

“Yes,” he answered, but did not move.

To him now, life seemed a shadow, day a white shadow; night, and death, and stillness, and inaction, this seemed like being. To be alive, to be urgent and insistent—that was not-to-be.3 The highest of all was to melt out into the darkness and sway there, identified with the great Being.

“The rain is coming in on us,” said Miriam.

He rose, and assisted her.

“It is a pity,” he said.

“What?”

“To have to go. I feel so still.”

“Still!” she repeated.

“Stiller than I have ever been in my life.”

He was walking with his hand in hers. She pressed his fingers, feeling a slight fear. Now he seemed beyond her; she had a fear lest she should lose him.

“The fir-trees are like presences on the darkness: each one only a presence.

She was afraid, and said nothing.

“A sort of hush: the whole night wondering and asleep: I suppose that’s what we do in death—sleep in wonder.”

She had been afraid before of the brute in him: now of the mystic. She trod beside him in silence. The rain fell with a heavy “Hush!” on the trees. At last they gained the cart-shed.

“Let us stay here awhile,” he said.

There was a sound of rain everywhere, smothering everything.

“I feel so strange and still,” he said, “along with everything.”

“Ay,” she answered patiently.

He seemed again unaware of her, though he held her hand close.

“To be rid of our individuality, which is our will, which is our effort—to live effortless, a kind of curious sleep—that is very beautiful, I think; that is our after-lire—our immortality.”

“Yes?”

“Yes—and very beautiful to have.”

“You don’t usually say that.”

“No.”

In a while they went indoors. Everybody looked at them curiously. He still kept the quiet, heavy look in his eyes, the stillness in his voice. Instinctively, they all left