You know where your things are?
I'll put boots on.'
He put on a cap, and an overcoat over his evening dress.
They went out into the night.
'Let us light a cigarette,' he said, stopping in a sheltered angle of the porch. 'You have one too.'
So, with the scent of tobacco on the night air, they set off down the dark drive that ran between close-cut hedges through sloping meadows.
He wanted to put his arm round her.
If he could put his arm round her, and draw her against him as they walked, he would equilibriate himself.
For now he felt like a pair of scales, the half of which tips down and down into an indefinite void.
He must recover some sort of balance.
And here was the hope and the perfect recovery.
Blind to her, thinking only of himself, he slipped his arm softly round her waist, and drew her to him.
Her heart fainted, feeling herself taken.
But then, his arm was so strong, she quailed under its powerful close grasp.
She died a little death, and was drawn against him as they walked down the stormy darkness.
He seemed to balance her perfectly in opposition to himself, in their dual motion of walking.
So, suddenly, he was liberated and perfect, strong, heroic.
He put his hand to his mouth and threw his cigarette away, a gleaming point, into the unseen hedge.
Then he was quite free to balance her.
'That's better,' he said, with exultancy.
The exultation in his voice was like a sweetish, poisonous drug to her.
Did she then mean so much to him!
She sipped the poison.
'Are you happier?' she asked, wistfully.
'Much better,' he said, in the same exultant voice, 'and I was rather far gone.'
She nestled against him.
He felt her all soft and warm, she was the rich, lovely substance of his being.
The warmth and motion of her walk suffused through him wonderfully.
'I'm SO glad if I help you,' she said.
'Yes,' he answered. 'There's nobody else could do it, if you wouldn't.'
'That is true,' she said to herself, with a thrill of strange, fatal elation.
As they walked, he seemed to lift her nearer and nearer to himself, till she moved upon the firm vehicle of his body.
He was so strong, so sustaining, and he could not be opposed.
She drifted along in a wonderful interfusion of physical motion, down the dark, blowy hillside.
Far across shone the little yellow lights of Beldover, many of them, spread in a thick patch on another dark hill.
But he and she were walking in perfect, isolated darkness, outside the world.
'But how much do you care for me!' came her voice, almost querulous. 'You see, I don't know, I don't understand!'
'How much!' His voice rang with a painful elation. 'I don't know either—but everything.'
He was startled by his own declaration. It was true.
So he stripped himself of every safeguard, in making this admission to her.
He cared everything for her—she was everything.
'But I can't believe it,' said her low voice, amazed, trembling.
She was trembling with doubt and exultance.
This was the thing she wanted to hear, only this.
Yet now she heard it, heard the strange clapping vibration of truth in his voice as he said it, she could not believe.
She could not believe—she did not believe.
Yet she believed, triumphantly, with fatal exultance.
'Why not?' he said. 'Why don't you believe it?
It's true.
It is true, as we stand at this moment—' he stood still with her in the wind; 'I care for nothing on earth, or in heaven, outside this spot where we are.