This avoidance of her eyes gave him a moment’s respite, during which his glance plunged into the receding depths of that looking-glass, depths lit up by the lamp as if by the swollen green bud of a luminous water-lily.

Round that green globe little phosphorescent rays flickered and darted. “If I meet her eyes again,” he thought, “she will come to me. She will let me undress her.”

A strange fear came upon him; and he felt as if he couldn’t take his eyes away from the looking-glass. Those darting radiations became like the transparent moons, surrounded by dim haloes, that move along at the bottom of ponds under the sticky feet of skimming water-flies. In the turmoil of his agitation, with the sense upon him that this was the crisis towards which his life had been moving for weeks and months, that mirror seemed no longer to reflect Christie’s bedroom. It seemed to him to be reflecting the mysterious depths of Lenty Pond!