It gave him one of the first pleasant feelings he had had that evening, to think of making Gerda laugh. “I won’t tell her till we’re in bed,” he thought. And then he thought: “I wonder if Olwen and Christie will sleep together tonight?”

As he moved between the well-known hedges of that road, along which just a year ago he had been driven by Darnley, he experienced a singular sensation. He felt as though he were beginning a posthumous life⁠—a life that his own cowardice had snatched from the end intended.