On and on he sat, with that sinking sun growing redder and redder before him, and the evening murmurs gathering in his ears; and as he sat, an immense solitude descended upon him, and he began to realize, as he had never realized before, how profoundly alone upon this planet each individual soul really is.

And with this feeling there came over him a deep, disturbing craving for Christie⁠—a craving so intense that the vision of all the length of all the days of his life without her seemed more than he could bear. “Only one life,” he thought to himself. “Only one life, between two eternities of nonexistence⁠ ⁠… and I am proposing deliberately to sacrifice in it the one thing that I really want!” He hugged his knees with tightly clasped fingers, and stared at the red orb before him, sinking now over Christie’s very roof.