"Why not die?" said another voice. "Will it be easier in three months' time than it is now? Will it ever be so easy again? See how near death is to life, a wheel within a wheel, two rings linked together. A touch, and you pass from one to the other."
Hugh looked wildly round him. The sun lay warm upon the tree-tops. It could not be that he was going to die here and now; here in the living sunshine, with the quiet, friendly faces of the hills all around him.
He strengthened his numb hold fiercely, all but lost it, regained it. Cramp, long held at bay, overcame him.
And the boat kept turning in the twilight. He reached the end of his strength, and held on beyond it. He heard some one near at hand suffocating in long-drawn gasps. Not Crack this time, but himself.
The boat was always turning in the darkness.
The struggle was over. "It is better so," said the other voice, through the roaring of a cataract near at hand. "Your mother will bear it better so. And all the long difficulties are over, and pain is past, and life is past, and sleep is best."
"But Rachel?"
She was here in the warm, swaying darkness. She was with him. She was Death. Death was only her arms round him in a great peace. Death was better than life. He let go the silly boat that kept him from her and turned wholly to her, his closed eyes against her breast.