He looked at her curiously, searchingly, and she hung her head a little guiltily.

‘And were you going to the hut now?’ he asked rather sternly.

‘No! I mustn’t. I stayed at Marehay. No one knows where I am. I’m late. I’ve got to run.’

‘Giving me the slip, like?’ he said, with a faint ironic smile.

‘No! No. Not that. Only —’

‘Why, what else?’ he said. And he stepped up to her and put his arms around her. She felt the front of his body terribly near to her, and alive.

‘Oh, not now, not now,’ she cried, trying to push him away.

‘Why not? It’s only six o’clock. You’ve got half an hour. Nay! Nay! I want you.’

He held her fast and she felt his urgency. Her old instinct was to fight for her freedom. But something else in her was strange and inert and heavy. His body was urgent against her, and she hadn’t the heart any more to fight.

He looked around.

‘Come — come here! Through here,’ he said, looking penetratingly into the dense fir-trees, that were young and not more than half-grown.

He looked back at her. She saw his eyes, tense and brilliant, fierce, not loving. But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way. She was giving up.

He led her through the wall of prickly trees, that were difficult to come through, to a place where was a little space and a pile of dead boughs. He threw one or two dry ones down, put his coat and waistcoat over them, and she had to lie down there under the boughs of the tree, like an animal, while he waited, standing there in his shirt and breeches, watching her with haunted eyes. But still he was provident — he made her lie properly, properly. Yet he broke the band of her underclothes, for she did not help him, only lay inert.

He too had bared the front part of his body and she felt his naked flesh against her as he came into her. For a moment he was still inside her, turgid there and quivering. Then as he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling inside her. Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside. It was like bells rippling up and up to a culmination. She lay unconscious of the wild little cries she uttered at the last. But it was over too soon, too soon, and she could no longer force her own conclusion with her own activity. This was different, different. She could do nothing. She could no longer harden and grip for her own satisfaction upon him. She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit as she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting, coming to the terrible moment when he would slip out of her and be gone. Whilst all her womb was open and soft, and softly clamouring, like a sea-anemone under the tide, clamouring for him to come in again and make a fulfilment for her. She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling till it filled all her cleaving consciousness, and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries. The voice out of the uttermost night, the life! The man heard it beneath him with a kind of awe, as his life sprang out into her. And as it subsided, he subsided too and lay utterly still, unknowing, while her grip on him slowly relaxed, and she lay inert. And they lay and knew nothing, not even of each other, both lost. Till at last he began to rouse and become aware of his defenceless nakedness, and she was aware that his body was loosening its clasp on her. He was coming apart; but in her breast she felt she could not bear him to leave her uncovered. He must cover her now for ever.

But he drew away at last, and kissed her and covered her over, and began to cover himself. She lay looking up to the boughs of the tree, unable as yet to move. He stood and fastened up his breeches, looking round. All was dense and silent, save for the awed dog that lay with its paws against its nose. He sat down again on the brushwood and took Connie’s hand in silence.

She turned and looked at him. ‘We came off together that time,’ he said.

She did not answer.

‘It’s good when it’s like that. Most folks live their lives through and they never know it,’ he said, speaking rather dreamily.

She looked into his brooding face.

‘Do they?’ she said. ‘Are you glad?’

He looked back into her eyes. ‘Glad,’ he said, ‘Ay, but never mind.’ He did not want her to talk. And he bent over her and kissed her, and she felt, so he must kiss her for ever.

At last she sat up.

‘Don’t people often come off together?’ she asked with naïve curiosity.

‘A good many of them never. You can see by the raw look of them.’ He spoke unwittingly, regretting he had begun.

‘Have you come off like that with other women?’

He looked at her amused.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I don’t know.’

And she knew he would never tell her anything he didn’t want to tell her. She watched his face, and the passion for him moved in her bowels. She resisted it as far as she could, for it was the loss of herself to herself.