Helen was to go alone to her parents’ rooms, where Benedict would also be brought and lunch would be prepared. The Driscolls, man and wife, were leaving for some commemorative occasion—there was often an event of the kind, which they unfailingly attended, leaving Dench in charge. Thus, at the top of the path, Helen walked on by herself, straight into that other existence where she had less and less place. As she walked, she put her hand to her mouth to hold his kiss, and to her breast to enclose his touch.

The man, instead, went to his own room and to his table—to those papers where the ruined continents and cultures and existences that had consumed his mind and body for years had given place to her story and his. He could not consider this a reduction—the one theme having embroiled the century and the world, and the other recasting his single fleeting miraculous life. Having expected, repeatedly, to die from the great fires into which his times had pitched him, he had discovered a desire to live completely; by which he meant, with her.