ed not go home,' he said. 'This car has seats that let down and
make a bed, and we can lift the hood.'

She was glad and frightened. She cowered near to him.

'But what about them at home?' she said.

'Send a telegram.'

Nothing more was said. They ran on in silence. But with a sort of
second consciousness he steered the car towards a destination. For he
had the free intelligence to direct his own ends. His arms and his
breast and his head were rounded and living like those of the Greek, he
had not the unawakened straight arms of the Egyptian, nor the sealed,
slumbering head. A lambent intelligence played secondarily above his
pure Egyptian concentration in darkness.

They came to a village that lined along the road. The car crept slowly
along, until he saw the post-office. Then he pulled up.

'I will send a telegram to your father,' he said. 'I will merely say
"spending the night in town," shall I?'

'Yes,' she answered. She did not want to be disturbed into taking
thought.

She watched him move into the post-office. It was also a shop, she saw.
Strange, he was. Even as he went into the lighted, public place he
remained dark and magic, the living silence seemed the body of reality
in him, subtle, potent, indiscoverable. There he was! In a strange
uplift of elation she saw him, the being never to be revealed, awful in
its potency, mystic and real. This dark, subtle reality of him, never
to be translated, liberated her into perfection, her own perfected
being. She too was dark and fulfilled in silence.

He came out, throwing some packages into the car.

'There is some bread, and cheese, and raisins, and apples, and hard
chocolate,' he said, in his voice that was as if laughing, because of
the unblemished stillness and force which was the reality in him. She
would have to touch him. To speak, to see, was nothing. It was a
travesty to look and to comprehend the man there. Darkness and silence
must fall perfectly on her, then she could know mystically, in
unrevealed touch. She must lightly, mindlessly connect with him, have
the knowledge which is death of knowledge, the reality of surety in
not-knowing.

Soon they had run on again into the darkness. She did not ask where
they were going, she did not care. She sat in a fullness and a pure
potency that was like apathy, mindless and immobile. She was next to
him, and hung in a pure rest, as a star is hung, balanced unthinkably.
Still there remained a dark lambenc