t of the turmoil
that wheeled around him. He had had no experience with women. There was
no precedent to guide him. How was he to get out of this? What was the
clew that would set everything straight again?

That he would give Hilma up, never once entered his head. Have her he
would. She had given herself to him. Everything should have been easy
after that, and instead, here he was alone in the night, wrestling with
himself, in deeper trouble than ever, and Hilma farther than ever away
from him.

It was true, he might have Hilma, even now, if he was willing to marry
her. But marriage, to his mind, had been always a vague, most remote
possibility, almost as vague and as remote as his death,--a thing that
happened to some men, but that would surely never occur to him, or, if
it did, it would be after long years had passed, when he was older, more
settled, more mature--an event that belonged to the period of his middle
life, distant as yet.

He had never faced the question of his marriage. He had kept it at an
immense distance from him. It had never been a part of his order of
things. He was not a marrying man.

But Hilma was an ever-present reality, as near to him as his right hand.
Marriage was a formless, far distant abstraction. Hilma a tangible,
imminent fact. Before he could think of the two as one; before he could
consider the idea of marriage, side by side with the idea of Hilma,
measureless distances had to be traversed, things as disassociated in
his mind as fire and water, had to be fused together; and between the
two he was torn as if upon a rack.

Slowly, by imperceptible degrees, the imagination, unused, unwilling
machine, began to work. The brain's activity lapsed proportionately.
He began to think less, and feel more. In that rugged composition,
confused, dark, harsh, a furrow had been driven deep, a little seed
planted, a little seed at first weak, forgotten, lost in the lower dark
places of his character.

But as the intellect moved slower, its functions growing numb, the
idea of self dwindled. Annixter no longer considered himself; no longer
considered the notion of marriage from the point of view of his own
comfort, his own wishes, his own advantage. He realised that in his
newfound desire to make her happy, he was sincere. There was something
in that idea, after all. To make some one happy--how about that now? It
was worth thinking of.

Far away, low down in the east, a dim belt, a grey light