He rose to his feet, too, and they stood awkwardly there, side by side in that windless darkness. Wolf had the feeling for one second as if the world had completely passed them by⁠ ⁠… gone on its way and forgotten them⁠ ⁠… so that not a soul knew they existed except themselves. As the shadow of a solitary bird on lonely sands answers the form of the bird’s flying, so did he feel at that moment that his spirit answered her spirit.

But the moment passed quickly. A vague, troubling remembrance of that “yellow bracken” down by the Lunt rose up suddenly without cause. “Gerda must be thinking of me,” he said to himself. And as this thought came into his head he couldn’t resist a savage, secret jibing at his own treachery. “I wonder,” he thought, “what Jason would say if he knew everything!”