ew, sweet follies. But he felt that she was
not really comforted, that she tried to delude herself.

"You _do_ feel tired--in your body--only in your body?--not in your
soul?" she repeated. "It isn't _I_, it's only _you_."

"It's only I who am dying," he almost felt that, with grim irony, he
would have liked to answer for her complete reassurance. The funny,
ugly, pathetic truth peeped out at him; she would rather have him die
than have him cease to love her.

Soulless sylvan creatures, dryads, nymphs, seemed to gaze from green
shadows among branches; the mocking faces of pucks and elves to tilt and
smile in the breeze-shaken flowers;--that subtle gaze, that sinister
smile, of what did it remind him? All Nature was laughing at him,
cruelly laughing; yet all Nature was consoling him.

His love and Kitty's was a flower rooted in death and contradiction. Not
affinity, not the growing needs of normal life had brought them
together; only the magic of doom and the craving to be loved.

Poor Kitty; she did not know. It was his love she loved, his love she
clung to and watched for and caressed. She did not know it, but she
would rather have him dead than have him loveless. That was the truth
that smiled the sinister smile. One might summon one's courage to smile
back at it, but one was rather glad to be leaving it--and Kitty.

And, in the days that followed, when from the pretence of passion he
could find refuge only in the pretence of dying, disgust crept into the
weariness, he began to wonder when the pretence would become reality. He
began to want to die.

This weariness, this irritation, this disgust belonged to life rather
than to death; it was a sharp longing to escape from consciousness of
Kitty--Kitty, alert and agonised in her suspicion. It was a nostalgic
longing for the old, tame, dusty life, his work, his selfless interests.
The month was almost up, and yet he was no worse; was he really going to
last for another month?

He said to Kitty one morning that he must go up to town. Her face grew
ashen. "The doctor! You are going to the doctor, Nicholas?"

"No, no; it's only that Collier is passing through. I heard from him
this morning. He wants to see me."

"Why should you bother and think about work now, darling?"

"Why, dearest, I must be of any use I can until the end."

He tried to keep lightness in his voice and patience out of it.

"Let him come down here. I'll write myself and ask him." She, too, wa