They both rose as he came into the room. He stood back in the shadow for a moment as though surprised at Olva's presence. Then he came forward very gravely.
"I've found something of yours, Dune," he said. It lay, gleaming, in his hand. "Your matchbox."
Dune drew a sharp breath. Then he took it and looked at it.
"In Saunet Wood. Bunker and I have been for a walk there. Bunker found it."
As the three of them stood there, motionless, in the middle of the dark room, Olva caught, through the open door, the last sad fading breath of the "Valse Triste."
That night the cold fell, like a plague, upon the town. It came, sweeping across the long low flats, crisping the dark canals with white frosted ice, stiffening the thin reeds at the river's edge, taking each blade of grass and holding it in its iron hand and then leaving it an independent thing of cold and shining beauty. At last it blew in wild gales down the narrow streets, throwing the colour of those grey walls against a sky of the sharpest blue, making of each glittering star a frozen eye, carrying in its arms a round red sun that it might fasten it, like a frosted orange, against its hard blue canopy.
Already now, at half-past two of the afternoon, there were signs of the early dusk. The blue was slowly being drained from the sky, and against the low horizon a faint golden shadow soon to burn into the heart of the cold blue, was hovering.
Olva Dune, turning into the King's Parade, was conscious of crowds of people, of a gaiety and life that filled the air with sound. He checked sternly with a furious exercise of self-control his impulse to creep back into the narrow streets that he had just left.
"It's an Idea," he repeated over and over, as he stood there. "It's an Idea. . . . You are like any one else--you are as you were . . . before . . . everything. There is no mark--no one knows."
For it seemed to him that above him, around him, always before him and behind him there was a grey shadow, and that as men approached him this shadow, bending, whispered, and, as they came to him, they flung at him a frightened glance . . . and passed.
If only he might take the arm of any one of those bright and careless young men and say to him, "I killed Carfax--thus and thus it was." Oh! the relief! the lifting of the weight! For then--and only then--this pursuing Shadow, so strangely grave, not cruel, but only relentless, would step back. Because that confession--how clearly he knew it!--was the thing that God demanded. So long as he kept silence he resisted the Pursuer--so long as he resisted the Pursuer he must fly, he must escape--first into Silence, then into Sound, then back again to Silence. Somewhere, behind his actual consciousness: there was the knowledge that, did he once yield himself, life would be well, but that yielding meant Confession, Renunciation, Devotion. It was not because it was Carfax that he had killed, but it was because it was God that had spoken to him, that he fled.