Removing his hands from his face, he swayed a little against the table, dizzy with his mental struggle. It was no use. His “mythology” would never help him again. That ecstasy, that escape from reality was gone. Dorsetshire had done for it!

He subsided into the same chair and waited, his hands outspread, palms-down, upon his knees, his heels together, his head bowed.

A kind of waking-trance took possession of him, in which he had the illusion that the smell of the pigsty and Gerda’s absence were the same thing. “I shall have to go to the Torps’ and ask about her,” he said to himself; but the words only tapped against one another in his brain like dry peas in a sieve.

Then he heard the gate click.

He rushed to the door, out of the house, and, heedless of everything but overwhelming relief, hugged her to his heart.