About dawn he woke and got up from her side. He moved with infinite caution lest he should disturb her, drawing on his clothes and socks, and picking up his shoes to put them on outside in the porch. From the threshold he looked back. In the pale winter light she lay like a little marble image; the serenity of her attitude seemed to put the whole weight of the adventure on his shoulders, and again he thought: "Why did I do it? What can come of it?" and stood dazed before the locked mystery of his own mind. In those short hours of passion the little girl who had seemed so familiar to him had suddenly become mysterious too; closest part of himself henceforth, yet utterly remote and inexplicable; a woman with a sealed soul, but with a body that clung to his… . The misgiving which had passed in a flash the night before now fastened on him with a cold tenacity. "What do I know about her? What does she know about me?" he questioned in a terror of self-scrutiny. He looked at her again, and the startled thought: "What if she were lying there dead?" flashed through his mind. How could such a horrible idea have come to him? In an instant his wild imagination had seized on it, and he saw himself maimed, desolate, crushed—but free. Free to open that door and go out, straight back to his life of two days before, without the awful burden of responsibility he had madly shouldered… . The vision lasted but the flicker of a lid, but like lightning at night in an unknown landscape it lit up whole tracts of himself that he had never seen. The horror was so strong that he half turned back to wake her up and dispel it. The faint stir of her breast under her thin nightdress reassured him, and he unlatched the door and went out… . Instantly the horror vanished, and as he saw before him the great motionless curves of sea and sky, and thought that all the while they had been there, hushed and secret, encircling his microscopic adventure, a sense of unifying power took possession of him, as it used to in his boyhood. "And all the time there was that!" he thought.