She loved him dearly.

He, as he lay with his face on the dead pine-leaves, felt extraordinarily quiet.

He did not mind if the raindrops came on him: he would have lain and got wet through: he felt as if nothing mattered, as if his living were smeared away into the beyond, near and quite lovable.

This strange, gentle reaching-out to death was new to him.
"We must go," said Miriam.
"Yes," he answered, but did not move.
To him now, life seemed a shadow, day a white shadow; night, and death, and stillness, and inaction, this seemed like BEING.

To be alive, to be urgent and insistent--that was NOT-TO-BE.