The darkness fell, but rose again, and as each day spread widely over the earth and parted them from the strange day in the forest when they had been forced to tell each other what they wanted, this wish of theirs was revealed to other people, and in the process became slightly strange to themselves.  Apparently it was not anything unusual that had happened; it was that they had become engaged to marry each other.  The world, which consisted for the most part of the hotel and the villa, expressed itself glad on the whole that two people should marry, and allowed them to see that they were not expected to take part in the work which has to be done in order that the world shall go on, but might absent themselves for a time.  They were accordingly left alone until they felt the silence as if, playing in a vast church, the door had been shut on them.  They were driven to walk alone, and sit alone, to visit secret places where the flowers had never been picked and the trees were solitary.  In solitude they could express those beautiful but too vast desires which were so oddly uncomfortable to the ears of other men and women—­desires for a world, such as their own world which contained two people seemed to them to be, where people knew each other intimately and thus judged each other by what was good, and never quarrelled, because that was waste of time.

They would talk of such questions among books, or out in the sun, or sitting in the shade of a tree undisturbed.  They were no longer embarrassed, or half-choked with meaning which could not express itself; they were not afraid of each other, or, like travellers down a twisting river, dazzled with sudden beauties when the corner is turned; the unexpected happened, but even the ordinary was lovable, and in many ways preferable to the ecstatic and mysterious, for it was refreshingly solid, and called out effort, and effort under such circumstances was not effort but delight.

While Rachel played the piano, Terence sat near her, engaged, as far as the occasional writing of a word in pencil testified, in shaping the world as it appeared to him now that he and Rachel were going to be married.  It was different certainly.  The book called Silence would not now be the same book that it would have been.  He would then put down his pencil and stare in front of him, and wonder in what respects the world was different—­it had, perhaps, more solidity, more coherence, more importance, greater depth.  Why, even the earth sometimes seemed to him very deep; not carved into hills and cities and fields, but heaped in great masses.  He would look out of the window for ten minutes at a time; but no, he did not care for the earth swept of human beings.  He liked human beings—­he liked them, he suspected, better than Rachel did.  There she was, swaying enthusiastically over her music, quite forgetful of him,—­but he liked that quality in her.  He liked the impersonality which it produced in her.  At last, having written down a series of little sentences, with notes of interrogation attached to them, he observed aloud, “’Women—­’under the heading Women I’ve written: