being unbroken and unchanged. But the
pressure was too great. He would have to find something to make good
the equilibrium. Something must come with him into the hollow void of
death in his soul, fill it up, and so equalise the pressure within to
the pressure without. For day by day he felt more and more like a
bubble filled with darkness, round which whirled the iridescence of his
consciousness, and upon which the pressure of the outer world, the
outer life, roared vastly.

In this extremity his instinct led him to Gudrun. He threw away
everything now--he only wanted the relation established with her. He
would follow her to the studio, to be near her, to talk to her. He
would stand about the room, aimlessly picking up the implements, the
lumps of clay, the little figures she had cast--they were whimsical and
grotesque--looking at them without perceiving them. And she felt him
following her, dogging her heels like a doom. She held away from him,
and yet she knew he drew always a little nearer, a little nearer.

'I say,' he said to her one evening, in an odd, unthinking, uncertain
way, 'won't you stay to dinner tonight? I wish you would.'

She started slightly. He spoke to her like a man making a request of
another man.

'They'll be expecting me at home,' she said.

'Oh, they won't mind, will they?' he said. 'I should be awfully glad if
you'd stay.'

Her long silence gave consent at last.

'I'll tell Thomas, shall I?' he said.

'I must go almost immediately after dinner,' she said.

It was a dark, cold evening. There was no fire in the drawing-room,
they sat in the library. He was mostly silent, absent, and Winifred
talked little. But when Gerald did rouse himself, he smiled and was
pleasant and ordinary with her. Then there came over him again the long
blanks, of which he was not aware.

She was very much attracted by him. He looked so preoccupied, and his
strange, blank silences, which she could not read, moved her and made
her wonder over him, made her feel reverential towards him.

But he was very kind. He gave her the best things at the table, he had
a bottle of slightly sweet, delicious golden wine brought out for
dinner, knowing she would prefer it to the burgundy. She felt herself
esteemed, needed almost.

As they took coffee in the library, there was a soft, very soft
knocking at the door. He started, and called 'Come in.' The timbre of
his voice, like something vibrating at high pitch, unnerved G