He got into bed that night some while before she did; and he lay quietly watching her, while she brushed her hair at their chest of drawers between the two half-open windows. This little wooden-framed looking-glass, on this clumsy pinewood object, had been Gerda’s only toilet-table from the start. “She shall have more of these things,” he thought, “when we’ve cashed that cheque!”

As he watched her candle-flame bend towards her in the faint airs that came wandering out of the night into the room⁠—as he watched the careful gesture with which she pushed back the candlestick as she stood there in her long-sleeved nightgown⁠—he pondered upon the death of his “mythology.”

“Perhaps it was an escape from reality,” he thought, “that I was bound to lose, if reality got hold of me! Dorsetshire, at any rate, seems to have got hold of me. No, no, I am not going back to London; and I am not going to drown myself in Lenty Pond!”