'You consoling me,' he answered.

'Nay,' she answered. 'Why should I console you? You know we love each
other--you know _how_ married we are! What does anything else matter?'

'Nothing at all, my dear.'

He felt for her face, and touched it, smiling.

'_You're_ all right, aren't you?' he asked, anxiously.

'I'm wonderfully all right, love,' she answered. 'It's you I am a little
troubled about, at times.'

'Why me?' he said, touching her cheeks delicately with the tips of his
fingers. The touch had an almost hypnotizing effect on her.

He went away upstairs. She saw him mount into the darkness, unseeing and
unchanging. He did not know that the lamps on the upper corridor were
unlighted. He went on into the darkness with unchanging step. She heard
him in the bathroom.

Pervin moved about almost unconsciously in his familiar surroundings,
dark though everything was. He seemed to know the presence of objects
before he touched them. It was a pleasure to him to rock thus through a
world of things, carried on the flood in a sort of blood-prescience. He
did not think much or trouble much. So long as he kept this sheer
immediacy of blood-contact with the substantial world he was happy, he
wanted no intervention of visual consciousness. In this state there was a