Suddenly she said to him with extraordinary beauty: "I engage myself to you forever."The beauty was in everything, and he could have separated nothing—couldn't have thought of her face as distinct from the whole joy. Yet her face had a new light. "And I pledge you—I call God to witness!—every spark of my faith; I give you every drop of my life.

They had exchanged vows and tokens, sealed their rich compact, solemnized, so far as breathed words and murmured sounds and lighted eyes and clasped hands could do it, their agreement to belong only, and to belong tremendously, to each other.

What had come to pass within his walls lingered there as an obsession importunate to all his senses; it lived again, as a cluster of pleasant memories, at every hour and in every object; it made everything but itself irrelevant and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious watchful presence, active on its own side, forever to be reckoned with, in face of which the effort at detachment was scarcely less futile than frivolous.

Your desire is to escape everything?""Everything.

I'll marry you, mind you, in an hour.""As we were?""As we were."But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. "We shall never be again as we were!

I'm a survivor—a survivor of a general wreck . . . everyone else has gone . . . I'm all that's left.

My dear man, what has happened to you?""Well, that I can bear it no longer. That's simply what has happened. Something has snapped, has broken in me, and here I am. It's as I am that you must have me.

I think I could die without its being noticed.

She sat with him at any rate, in the grey clearance—as sad as a winter dawn—made by their meeting.