“Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat.  When the insistent I sleeps, only then perhaps can the heart be truly awake, be really watchful.  Then let us send the insistent I to sleep, and let us keep it slumbering.”

He half-smiled as he finished.  There had been something slightly whimsical about his final words, about his manner and himself when he said them.

Silence and the fog, and Rosamund walking homewards with her hands deep in her muff.  All those bodies and minds and souls which had been in the church had evaporated into the night.  Mrs. Chetwinde and Esme Darlington had wanted to speak to Rosamund, but she had slipped out of the church quickly.  She did not wish to talk to any one.

“Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat.”

What an odd little turn, or twist, the preacher had given to the meaning of those words!  “Whenever you have to take some big decision between two life courses, ask yourself, ‘Which can I share?’ and if you can only share one, choose that.”

Very slowly Rosamund walked on, bending a little above the big muff, like one pulled forward by a weight of heavy thoughts.  She turned a corner.  Presently she turned another corner and traversed a square, which could not be seen to be a square.  And then, quite suddenly, she realized that she had not been thinking about her way home and that she was lost in the impenetrable fog.

She stood still and listened.  She heard nothing.  Traffic seemed stopped in this region.  On her left there were three steps.  She went up them and was under the porch of a house.  Light shone dully from within, and by it she could just make out on the door the number “8.”  At least it seemed to her that probably it was an “8.”  She hesitated, came down the steps, and walked on.  It was impossible to see the names of the streets and squares.  But presently she would come across a policeman.  She went on and on, but no policeman bulked shadowy against the background of night and of the fog which at last seemed almost terrible to her.

Rosamund was not timid.  She was constitutionally incapable of timidity.  Nor was she actively alarmed in a strong and definite way.  But gradually there seemed to permeate her a cold, almost numbing sensation of loneliness and of desolation.  For the first time in her life she felt not merely alone but solitary, and not merely solitary but as if she were condemned to be so by some power that was hostile to her.

It was a hideous feeling.  Something in the fog and in the night made an assault upon her imagination.  Abruptly she was numbered among the derelict women whom nobody wants, whom no man thinks of or wishes to be with, whom no child calls mother.  She felt physically and morally, “I am solitary,” and it was horrible to her.  She saw herself old and alone, and she shuddered.

How long she walked on she did not know, but when at last she heard a step shuffling along somewhere in front of her, she had almost—­she thought—­realized Eternity.