If only he could do this now, by some occult manipulation of the laws of nature! Gerda’s sleep was deep and sound. To her at this moment Time was nothing. How mad it was that he couldn’t plunge with Christie, with the inmost soul of Christie, into some region outside these things, where a moment was like a whole year of mortal life!

The vast expanse he looked at, had about it, under this grey sky, something wistful and withdrawn. It resembled those patient, melancholy fields, neither happy nor unhappy, where Dante met the souls of the great intellects in Limbo. With his eyes fixed upon its patient-coloured horizons, it did not seem so crazy a notion that he and Christie might meet and escape, lost, merged, diffused into all this!

And then he turned his gaze upon the beautiful girl lying there outstretched beside him, happy in her timeless dreamworld, trusting him, trusting nature, half-smiling in her sleep.