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she was not. So; was it love she felt? But what else could it be? Well, if it was, love was a cold thing, as sharp and in different as a flailing sword, and now it had cut her again.
    She lay still and exhausted on the shingle. The darkness was complete at last, and the rain had settled into a steady beating rhythm. She shivered. She was soaked through and through. She wondered what was happening down there on the rock: had there been men there, rescuing a boat? It had flickered intermittently on the screen of the world like a scrap of dream, and she was no longer sure if it had happened at all. And where was he now?
    No; that was ended. She had discovered him, but she had turned her back and gone away; she had told him, but she had done so in a scream that no-one would have understood; and now it must come to an end, and be forgotten.
    She gradually became conscious of a sharp pain in her left leg, and eased it away from a stone that pressed against the shin. As she did so she felt suddenly cold, as if she had been sustained up to that moment by the warmth in his hand and fingers. She shivered again, tired out and empty. Had he thought she was beautiful? The thought came from nowhere and disappeared.
    She sat up stiffly and leant her weight on her right arm. The wind blew her hair across her eyes for a second, and the wet strands of it slapped and stung her cheeks. The light had all gone; she could see only the obscure line of the horizon, and when she looked round, the dim shapes of the sandhills; but she saw more from memory than by the sight of her eyes. The rain dashed into her face and numbed her.
    Now she would have to leave this stormy mask behind her, and walk out of the drama of night and air and water and go back home, faceless. Tattered snatches of movement still caught at the edges of her soul and tempted her to run back down the beach, seek him out, force his eyes to stare into hers again and then never leave him; but they were only broken impulses without any weight of meaning behind them, and they clung for a second, and then fell off. The knowledge that in an hour or so she would have no identity – that she had no identity now – frightened her suddenly, but it was a familiar fear, and she knew how to deal with it.
    Her method was to recollect as painstakingly as possible all the circumstances which had formed her, and then to pretend that they were true; to repeat her name over and over under her breath, and then to pretend that she was herself. In this way she preserved a fragile and tenuous stability which enabled her to live her real life and experience her real obsessions unobserved.
    But this time, she realised, the reconstruction of her false self would have to be far more elaborate, detailed, and passionately carried out than ever before; because she had no way of telling when, if ever, she would be able to abandon it again.
    She stood up carefully and leant against the wind, pushing her hair out of her eyes and looking intently towards the sea; and saw nothing there but chaos and darkness. A slight dizziness affected her for a moment, and she nearly fell over; and in that second she felt suddenly warm, and heard a voice speaking with great clarity; but when she recovered and stood upright again, she had forgotten what it had said.
    She turned her back on the sea and began to walk up towards the dunes. She had so much to examine, to sort out – really, it seemed as if she had lived for a thousand years. She was assailed, as her feet met the first patch of sand, by an oceanic sense of tragedy that made her put her hands to her head and rock back and forth with anguish; and it was only after a low moan of pain had escaped her lips that she recognised the source of it in the intense pain in her ears, caused by the cold wind and the rain. The impressions of her senses and the impulses of her mind were inextricably confused; she realised it, and found in it merely another cause for regret. The world –