There was a moment’s pause.

‘Why not?’ asked Gerald.

Loerke shrugged his shoulders.

‘I don’t find them interesting—or beautiful—they are no good to me, for my work.’

‘Do you mean to say a woman isn’t beautiful after she is twenty?’ asked Gerald.

‘For me, no. Before twenty, she is small and fresh and tender and slight. After that—let her be what she likes, she has nothing for me. The Venus of Milo is a bourgeoise—so are they all.’

‘And you don’t care for women at all after twenty?’ asked Gerald.

‘They are no good to me, they are of no use in my art,’ Loerke repeated impatiently. ‘I don’t find them beautiful.’

‘You are an epicure,’ said Gerald, with a slight sarcastic laugh.

‘And what about men?’ asked Gudrun suddenly.

‘Yes, they are good at all ages,’ replied Loerke. ‘A man should be big and powerful—whether he is old or young is of no account, so he has the size, something of massiveness and—and stupid form.’

Ursula went out alone into the world of pure, new snow. But the dazzling whiteness seemed to beat upon her till it hurt her, she felt the cold was slowly strangling her soul. Her head head felt dazed and numb.

Suddenly she wanted to go away. It occurred to her, like a miracle, that she might go away into another world. She had felt so doomed up here in the eternal snow, as if there were no beyond.

Now suddenly, as by a miracle she remembered that away beyond, below her, lay the dark fruitful earth, that towards the south there were stretches of land dark with orange trees and cypress, grey with olives, that ilex trees lifted wonderful plumy tufts in shadow against a blue sky. Miracle of miracles!—this utterly silent, frozen world of the mountain–tops was not universal! One might leave it and have done with it. One might go away.

She wanted to realise the miracle at once. She wanted at this instant to have done with the snow–world, the terrible, static ice–built mountain tops. She wanted to see the dark earth, to smell its earthy fecundity, to see the patient wintry vegetation, to feel the sunshine touch a response in the buds.

She went back gladly to the house, full of hope. Birkin was reading, lying in bed.

‘Rupert,’ she said, bursting in on him. ‘I want to go away.’

He looked up at her slowly.

‘Do you?’ he replied mildly.

She sat by him und put her arms round his neck. It surprised her that he was so little surprised.

‘Don’t YOU?’ she asked troubled.

‘I hadn’t thought about it,’ he said. ‘But I’m sure I do.’

She sat up, suddenly erect.

‘I hate it,’ she said. ‘I hate the snow, and the unnaturalness of it, the unnatural light it throws on everybody, the ghastly glamour, the unnatural feelings it makes everybody have.’

“You stopped, and then walked back to the garden gate,” my companion interrupted. “What did you do that for?”

Rance gave a violent jump, and stared at Sherlock Holmes with the utmost amazement upon his features.

“Why, that’s true, sir,” he said; “though how you come to know it, Heaven only knows. Ye see when I got up to the door, it was so still and so lonesome, that I thought I’d be none the worse for someone with me. I ain’t afeared of anything on this side o’ the grave; but I thought that maybe it was him that died o’ the typhoid inspecting the drains what killed him. The thought gave me a kind o’ turn, and I walked back to the gate to see if I could see Murcher’s lantern, but there wasn‘t no sign of him nor of anyone else.”

“There was no one in the street?”

“Not a livin’ soul, sir, nor as much as a dog. Then I pulled myself together and went back and pushed the door open. All was quiet inside, so I went into the room where the light was a-burnin’. There was a candle flickerin’ on the mantelpiece — a red wax one — and by its light I saw —”

“Yes, I know all that you saw. You walked round the room several times, and you knelt down by the body, and then you walked through and tried the kitchen door, and then —”

John Rance sprang to his feet with a frightened face and suspicion in his eyes. “Where was you hid to see all that?” he cried. “It seems to me that you knows a deal more than you should.”

Holmes laughed and threw his card across the table to the constable. “Don’t go arresting me for the murder,” he said. “I am one of the hounds and not the wolf; Mr. Gregson or Mr. Lestrade will answer for that. Go on, though. What did you do next?”

Rance resumed his seat, without, however, losing his mystified expression. “I went back to the gate and sounded my whistle. That brought Murcher and two more to the spot.”

“Was the street empty then?”

“Well, it was, as far as anybody that could be of any good goes.”

“What do you mean?”

The constable’s features broadened into a grin, “I‘ve seen many a drunk chap in my time,” he said, “but never anyone so cryin’ drunk as that cove. He was at the gate when I came out, a-leanin’ up ag’in the railings, and a-singin’ at the pitch o’ his lungs about Columbine’s New-fangled Banner, or some such stuff. He couldn’t stand, far less help.”

“What sort of a man was he?” asked Sherlock Holmes.

John Rance appeared to be somewhat irritated at this digression. “He was an uncommon drunk sort o’ man,” he said. “He’d ha’ found hisself in the station if we hadn’t been so took up.”

“His face — his dress — didn’t you notice them?” Holmes broke in impatiently.