‘And I shall strike the last,’ she retorted involuntarily, with confident assurance. He was silent, he did not contradict her.

She stood negligently, staring away from him, into the distance. On the edge of her consciousness the question was asking itself, automatically:

‘Why ARE you behaving in this IMPOSSIBLE and ridiculous fashion.’ But she was sullen, she half shoved the question out of herself. She could not get it clean away, so she felt self–conscious.

Gerald, very pale, was watching her closely. His eyes were lit up with intent lights, absorbed and gleaming. She turned suddenly on him.

‘It’s you who make me behave like this, you know,’ she said, almost suggestive.

‘I? How?’ he said.

But she turned away, and set off towards the lake. Below, on the water, lanterns were coming alight, faint ghosts of warm flame floating in the pallor of the first twilight. The earth was spread with darkness, like lacquer, overhead was a pale sky, all primrose, and the lake was pale as milk in one part. Away at the landing stage, tiniest points of coloured rays were stringing themselves in the dusk. The launch was being illuminated. All round, shadow was gathering from the trees.

Gerald, white like a presence in his summer clothes, was following down the open grassy slope. Gudrun waited for him to come up. Then she softly put out her hand and touched him, saying softly:

‘Don’t be angry with me.’

A flame flew over him, and he was unconscious. Yet he stammered:

‘I’m not angry with you. I’m in love with you.’

His mind was gone, he grasped for sufficient mechanical control, to save himself. She laughed a silvery little mockery, yet intolerably caressive.

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ she said.

The terrible swooning burden on his mind, the awful swooning, the loss of all his control, was too much for him. He grasped her arm in his one hand, as if his hand were iron.

‘It’s all right, then, is it?’ he said, holding her arrested.

She looked at the face with the fixed eyes, set before her, and her blood ran cold.

‘Yes, it’s all right,’ she said softly, as if drugged, her voice crooning and witch–like.

He walked on beside her, a striding, mindless body. But he recovered a little as he went. He suffered badly. He had killed his brother when a boy, and was set apart, like Cain.

They found Birkin and Ursula sitting together by the boats, talking and laughing. Birkin had been teasing Ursula.

‘Do you smell this little marsh?’ he said, sniffing the air. He was very sensitive to scents, and quick in understanding them.

‘It’s rather nice,’ she said.

‘No,’ he replied, ‘alarming.’

‘Why alarming?’ she laughed.

‘It seethes and seethes, a river of darkness,’ he said, ‘putting forth lilies and snakes, and the ignis fatuus, and rolling all the time onward. That’s what we never take into count—that it rolls onwards.’