moon-path. They must set off downhill. He felt her arm clasped firmly,
joyously, round his waist. Therein was his stability and warm support.
Siegmund felt a keen flush of pitiful tenderness for her as she walked
with buoyant feet beside him, clasping him so happily, all unconscious.
This pity for her drew him nearer to life.

He shuddered lightly now and again, as they stepped lurching down the
hill. He set his jaws hard to suppress this shuddering. It was not in
his limbs, or even on the surface of his body, for Helena did not notice
it. Yet he shuddered almost in anguish internally.

'What is it?' he asked himself in wonder.

His thought consisted of these detached phrases, which he spoke verbally
to himself. Between-whiles he was conscious only of an almost
insupportable feeling of sickness, as a man feels who is being brought
from under an anaesthetic; also he was vaguely aware of a teeming stir
of activity, such as one may hear from a closed hive, within him.

They swung rapidly downhill. Siegmund still shuddered, but not so
uncontrollably. They came to a stile which they must climb. As he
stepped over it needed a concentrated effort of will to place his foot
securely on the step. The effort was so great that he became
conscious of it.

'Good Lord!' he said to himself. 'I wonder what it is.'

He tried to examine himself. He thought of all the organs of his
body--his brain, his heart, his liver. There was no pain, and nothing
wrong with any of them, he was sure. His dim searching resolved itself