ery much, only
something that would bring him a line from her.

For ten days now he had waited and there had come no word. As these
first flakes of snow softly, relentlessly, fell past his window the
nebulous cloud of all the uncertainties, disappointments, rebellions, of
this pointless wasted thing that men called Life crystallized into
form--"I'm no good--Life, like this, it's impossible--I'm no good
against it--I'd better climb down...."

And here the irony of it was that he'd never climbed _up_.

The awful moments in Life are those that threaten us by their suspension
of all action. "Just feel what's piling up for you out of all this
silence," they seem to say. Breton's trouble now was that he did not
know in what direction to move. His relation to Rachel was so nebulous
that it could scarcely be called a relation at all.

He only knew that she alone was the person for whom now life was worth
combating. He had told her in his letter that she could help him, and
the absence of an answer spoke now, in this threatening silence, with
mighty reverberating voice. "She doesn't care."

Well then, who else is there? Almost he could have fancied that his
grandmother, there in the Portland Place house, was withdrawing from him
all the supports in which he trusted.

Now the snow, falling ever more swiftly, ever more stealthily, seemed to
be with him in the room, stifling, choking, blinding.

He felt that if he could not find company of some kind he would go mad,
and so, leaving the storm and the silence behind him in his room, he
went to find Lizzie Rand.

II

Lizzie Rand did not conceal from herself now that she loved him. So long
had her emotional life been waiting there, undesired, that now it could
be kept by her utterly apart from her daily habit, but it became a
flame, a fire, that lighted with its splendid warmth and colour the
whole of her accustomed world. She indulged it now without restraint,
through the long dark autumn she had it treasured there; she did not, as
things then were, ask for more than this splendid knowledge that there
was now someone upon whom she loved to spend her care. She had not loved
to spend it upon her mother and sister, but that had been a duty defined
and necessary. Now everything that she could do for Breton was more fuel
to fling to her flame. That further question as to whether he might care
for her she kept just in sight, but nevertheless not definite enough to
risk the abso