What was it?
But a moment, yet in that little space it seemed to him as though continents divided them, and seas rolled between.

"Francesca!" he cried, under his breath,--he had never before called her by her Christian name,--"Francesca!" and stretched out his hand towards her, as a drowning man stretches forth his hand to life.
"This room is stifling!" she said for answer; and her voice, dulled and unnatural, seemed to his strangely confused senses as though it came from a far distance,--"I am suffering: shall we go out to the air ?".