His human soul seemed to leave its body and pass out of that small room into the great air-spaces that suspended themselves above the West Country. The interior chilliness of the darkness as the delaying dawn drew him forth, had that within it which corresponded to the spring of the year; only, this was the spring of one winter’s night! There was a greenish, wet-growing stir in that dawn’s approach; and the whole night about him seemed to shudder and contract like the cramped shuddering of an unborn child.

Not a muscle did he move as he lay there, hunched and inert, his stiff fingers folded around Gerda’s right breast like the fingers of an infant around the toy with which it has been soothed to sleep. But within his curved skeleton his mind was lucid with the lucidity of something starkly at bay.