It came to him like a feeling of sickness that it was not absolutely impossible that those Christians, in spite of that personal ridiculousness which he had noticed in nearly all of them, were right.  It might be that sin was sin and left a stain, and that those things which had appeared to him as innocently sweet as a bathe in a summer sea, and which he had believed to end utterly with dawn and the stealthy shutting of a door, had somehow left him loathsome to this girl.  He perceived that there might have been a meaning adverse to him in the way she had delayed, in despite of her own wish to hurry, and pinned up her hair.  Perhaps she had seen something in his face which made her shiver with apprehension that his hands might touch it; not because it was her hair, but because they were his hands and had acquired a habit of fingering women’s beauties.  But indeed he was not like that.  He sweated with panic, and raged silently against this streak of materialism in women that makes them so grossly dwell on the physical events in a man’s life.  This agony of tenderness he felt for her now, this passion of worship that kept half his mind inactive yet tense, like a devotee contemplating the altar, was more real than anything he had ever felt for those other women.

The bus came down the road to them and he stepped forward, shouting and lifting his stick.  But it swept on, packed with soldiers in red coats, who sent out into the darkness behind them a fan of song.  “It’s the soldiers from the barracks at Glencorse, bother them,” sighed Ellen.  “And dear knows when there’s a train.”  She spoke with such a flat extremity of despair that he peered at her through the darkness and found that her head had fallen back and her eyes were almost closed.  Evidently she had been overcome by one of those sudden prostrations to which young people are liable when they have spilt out their strength too recklessly.  He remembered how once, when the Gondomar had been scuttling for two days at the fringe of a cyclone, he had seen a cabin-boy lean back against a mast and become suddenly statuesque with inertia, with such a queer pinching of the mouth as hers.  “It’s all right,” he said comfortingly.  “There’s a train in a quarter of an hour.”  She must have heard him, for she began to walk towards the station lights that twinkled up the road, but she answered in a tone that sounded as if her mind was inaccessible with somnolence, “I’m half asleep.”

The train was in when they reached the station, and he told her to take a seat in it while he got the tickets.  But she did not.  Its carriages were not yet lit, and it looked black and cold and cheerless, like those burned buildings they had seen at Balerno; and anyway, she did not want to take that train.  She would have liked to turn back with him through the dark avenues into the Pentlands.  The sunset, which had somehow been as vexing as it was beautiful, would by then have receded utterly before