al presence, and his horror, almost, of her
lucidity. They made in him a mixture that might have been rage, but
that was turning quickly to mere cold thought, thought which led to
something else and was like a new dim dawn. It affected her then, and
she had one of the impulses, in all sincerity, that had before this,
between them, saved their position. When she had come nearer to him,
when, putting her hand upon him, she made him sink with her, as she
leaned to him, into their old pair of chairs, she prevented
irresistibly, she forestalled, the waste of his passion. She had an
advantage with his passion now.

III

He had said to her in the Park when challenged on it that nothing had
"happened" to him as a cause for the demand he there made of
her--happened he meant since the account he had given, after his
return, of his recent experience. But in the course of a few days--they
had brought him to Christmas morning--he was conscious enough, in
preparing again to seek her out, of a difference on that score.
Something had in this case happened to him, and, after his taking the
night to think of it he felt that what it most, if not absolutely
first, involved was his immediately again putting himself in relation
with her. The fact itself had met him there--in his own small
quarters--on Christmas Eve, and had not then indeed at once affected
him as implying that consequence. So far as he on the spot and for the
next hours took its measure--a process that made his night mercilessly
wakeful--the consequences possibly implied were numerous to
distraction. His spirit dealt with them, in the darkness, as the slow
hours passed; his intelligence and his imagination, his soul and his
sense, had never on the whole been so intensely engaged. It was his
difficulty for the moment that he was face to face with alternatives,
and that it was scarce even a question of turning from one to the
other. They were not in a perspective in which they might be compared
and considered; they were, by a strange effect, as close as a pair of
monsters of whom he might have felt on either cheek the hot breath and
the huge eyes. He saw them at once and but by looking straight before
him; he wouldn't for that matter, in his cold apprehension, have turned
his head by an inch. So it was that his agitation was still--was not,
for the slow hours a matter of restless motion. He lay long, after the
event, on the sofa where, extinguishing at a touch the white li