ntimacy, as though the question were not "Never," but "Never
again."

Wrenching her hands away, she made a despairing gesture.

"Tear it out," she repeated. "It's only by doing so that you can
please me."

"Will you help me to kill it? Will you lend a hand by making your
beauty hideous, your nature repulsive? Come and take a drive with me.
Just an hour or two. How long do you need to destroy it?"

"Ah," she breathed, closing her eyes in pain.

In a broad-brimmed hat that matched her muslin gown she went down the
steps to his car. The high, gray walls of the house disappeared behind
a rush of trees; the conical turret roofs of slate sank quickly away.

From the terrace Cornelius Rysbroek stared at the distant gateway
through which they had vanished.

The car rushed through the countryside. The orderly fields stretched
away toward gentle slopes on which cows were grazing. Here and there a
village abruptly spread out its roofs, which rotated on the axis of a
spire. All the windows gave back the light of late afternoon; and far
off, against a hollow between two hills, like wine in a cup, there was
a ruddy flash of water. It was the Sound; and beyond the Sound lay the
sea.

A cloud covered the setting sun.

"So you pretend to begrudge me this perfected feeling, this
verification, that I'll carry back with me!"

He told her that over there he would build a perfect similacrum of her
out of his thoughts, as an enchanter might form at will in the
twinkling of an eye the likeness of some one who was far away. "You
shall even move and speak," he predicted, "and I'll make your glances
and your words whatever I want them to be. Look out for yourself!
That is sorcery. I shall have taken a part of you away from yourself,
across the ocean, to Africa where the forests are full of magicians.
Over here you'll no longer be complete. You'll turn your eyes
southeast with a sense of missing something from your heart."

He gazed ahead at the road that the car was devouring with an endless
purr of triumph. He pursued his fancy, while the car pursued the
glimmer of the Sound, which was escaping amid the first thin veils of
the twilight.

He promised that she, to whom everything uncouth and primitive was
repugnant, would smile beside him in those equatorial tangles, or, at
any rate, that she would do so in his dream of her. In the camp
surrounded by a hedge of thorns, in the firelight flickering on the
shoulder blad