“Oh, no; don’t frighten me!  I can’t bear it tonight!” She hid her face against his shoulder like a child.  He put his arm round her and she pressed her face deep into his coat.  This ghost of Bob Tryst holding him away from her!  This enemy!  This uncanny presence!  She pressed closer, closer, and put her face up to his.  It was wonderfully lonely, silent, whispering, with the moongleams slipping through the willow boughs into the shadow where they stood.  And from his arms warmth stole through her!  Closer and closer she pressed, not quite knowing what she did, not quite knowing anything but that she wanted him never to let her go; wanted his lips on hers, so that she might feel his spirit pass, away from what was haunting it, into hers, never to escape.  But his lips did not come to hers.  They stayed drawn back, trembling, hungry-looking, just above her lips.  And she whispered: 

“Kiss me!”

She felt him shudder in her arms, saw his eyes darken, his lips quiver and quiver, as if he wanted them to, but they would not.  What was it?  Oh, what was it?  Wasn’t he going to kiss her—­not to kiss her?  And while in that unnatural pause they stood, their heads bent back among the moongleams and those willow shadows, there passed through Nedda such strange trouble as she had never known.  Not kiss her!  Not kiss her!  Why didn’t he?  When in her blood and in the night all round, in the feel of his arms, the sight of his hungry lips, was something unknown, wonderful, terrifying, sweet!  And she wailed out: 

“I want you—­I don’t care—­I want you!” She felt him sway, reel, and clutch her as if he were going to fall, and all other feeling vanished in the instinct of the nurse she had already been to him.  He was ill again!  Yes, he was ill!  And she said: 

“Derek—­don’t!  It’s all right.  Let’s walk on quietly!”

She got his arm tightly in hers and drew him along toward home.  By the jerking of that arm, the taut look on his face, she could feel that he did not know from step to step whether he could stay upright.  But she herself was steady and calm enough, bent on keeping emotion away, and somehow getting him back along the river-path, abandoned now to the moon and the bright, still spaces of the night and the slow-moving, whitened water.  Why had she not felt from the first that he was overwrought and only fit for bed?

Thus, very slowly, they made their way up by the factory again into the lane by the church magnate’s garden, under the branches of the sycamores, past the same white-faced old house at the corner, to the high street where some few people were still abroad.