ou will love me for ever--won't
you--won't you?'

But it was her voice only that coaxed him. Her senses were entirely
apart from him, cold and destructive of him. It was her overbearing
WILL that insisted.

'Won't you say you'll love me always?' she coaxed. 'Say it, even if it
isn't true--say it Gerald, do.'

'I will love you always,' he repeated, in real agony, forcing the words
out.

She gave him a quick kiss.

'Fancy your actually having said it,' she said with a touch of
raillery.

He stood as if he had been beaten.

'Try to love me a little more, and to want me a little less,' she said,
in a half contemptuous, half coaxing tone.

The darkness seemed to be swaying in waves across his mind, great waves
of darkness plunging across his mind. It seemed to him he was degraded
at the very quick, made of no account.

'You mean you don't want me?' he said.

'You are so insistent, and there is so little grace in you, so little
fineness. You are so crude. You break me--you only waste me--it is
horrible to me.'

'Horrible to you?' he repeated.

'Yes. Don't you think I might have a room to myself, now Ursula has
gone? You can say you want a dressing room.'

'You do as you like--you can leave altogether if you like,' he managed
to articulate.

'Yes, I know that,' she replied. 'So can you. You can leave me whenever
you like--without notice even.'

The great tides of darkness were swinging across his mind, he could
hardly stand upright. A terrible weariness overcame him, he felt he
must lie on the floor. Dropping off his clothes, he got into bed, and
lay like a man suddenly overcome by drunkenness, the darkness lifting
and plunging as if he were lying upon a black, giddy sea. He lay still
in this strange, horrific reeling for some time, purely unconscious.

At length she slipped from her own bed and came over to him. He
remained rigid, his back to her. He was all but unconscious.

She put her arms round his terrifying, insentient body, and laid her
cheek against his hard shoulder.

'Gerald,' she whispered. 'Gerald.'

There was no change in him. She caught him against her. She pressed her
breasts against his shoulders, she kissed his shoulder, through the
sleeping jacket. Her mind wondered, over his rigid, unliving body. She
was bewildered, and insistent, only her will was set for him to speak
to her.

'Gerald, my dear!' she whispered, bending over him, kissing his ear.

Her warm breath playing, flying