ow
they have come pressing in through the narrow gate I left ajar. Only to
mock and mislead. It's all dark and unintelligible.'

He touched her hand, peering out of the shadows that seemed to him to be
gathering between their faces. He drew her closer and touched her lips
with his fingers. Her beauty seemed to his distorted senses to fill
earth and sky. This, then, was the presence, the grave and lovely
overshadowing dream whose surrender made life a torment, and death the
near fold of an immortal, starry veil. She broke from him with a faint
cry. And he found himself running and running, just as he had run that
other night, with death instead of life for inspiration, towards his
earthly home.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

He was utterly wearied, but he walked on for a long while with a dogged
unglancing pertinacity and without looking behind him. Then he rested
under the dew-sodden hedgeside and buried his face in his hands. Once,
indeed, he did turn and grind his way back with hard uplifted face for
many minutes, but at the meeting with an old woman who in the late dusk
passed him unheeded on the road, he stopped again, and after standing
awhile looking down upon the dust, trying to gather up the tangled
threads of his thoughts, he once more set off homewards.

It was clear, starry, and quite dark when he reached the house. The lamp
at the roadside obscurely lit its breadth and height. Lamp-light within,
too, was showing yellow between the Venetian blinds; a cold gas-jet
gleamed out of the basement window. He seemed bereft now of all desire
or emotion, simply the passive witness of things external in a calm
which, though he scarcely realised its cause, was an exquisite solace
and relief. His senses were intensely sharpened with sleeplessness. The
faintest sound belled clear and keen on his ear. The thinnest beam of
light besprinkled his eyes with curious brilliance.

As quietly as some nocturnal creature he ascended the steps to the
porch, and leaning between stone pilaster and wall, listened intently
for any rumour of those within.

He heard a clear, rather languid and delicate voice quietly speak on
until it broke into a little peal of laughter, followed, when it fell
silent by Sheila's--rapid, rich, and low. The first speaker seemed to be
standing. Probably, then, his evening visitors had only just come in, or
were preparing to depart. He inserted his latchkey and gently pushed at
the cumbersome door. It was lock