In a week, perhaps, the coast and hills would have vanished for ever for both of them: he did not think that either he or she would return. A year from now it would need an effort of memory to bring the place to life again for a moment; he would start at its name and realize that it had without them both, after all, some shadowy continuity. If an earthquake were to ruin the town, or a landslide demolish the whole coast, he thought he would be left with hardly a pang once horror subsided. The place would persist unimpaired in his memory, not much loved, scarcely thought of, but queerly complete if he happened to turn to it – as the least loved, most rarely revisited places often remain. The momentary impacts of colour and smells and light in his senses that had built up the place for him would be forgotten, only the sum of them, that he might have received in an idle half-day, would remain. A thousand hours superimposed on each other would melt into one; a thousand that had in turn been unique, coloured differently each from the others by mood or circumstance.

‘Will she ever,’ he wondered, ‘be so complete to me; not a succession of moments but one? Will these evenings, mornings, lights, memories, shadows, half-apprehensions, glimpses, ever fall away or run together and be merged in the whole of her? Could I love her so well if they were? Is there a human being any more than a Godhead with which one could bear to be face to face?’