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she had loved, who were dead.—Her father, her mother, Charlie, her brothers Christopher and Martin, and the young sister Alison who had died in girlhood, nearly breaking her mother’s heart—though that had not finally broken until her father went. And it was strange to think of them all ending so sadly when they had been such a happy family. And all were dead: for ever and ever and ever. She felt herself repeating the words ‘For ever.’ Such strange words. In form they seemed to possess something; but it was only the dust of oblivion. They were all gone; irretrievably submerged in the salt, dissolving ocean of time, and even the few sparkling memories that lingered on in the minds of the living would soon be extinguished.

Now, detached, emotionless, yet stricken to the heart as if by a deadly drug, she lay and saw a vast cliff rising as far as the eye could reach; as vast and dark and towering as a tidal wave, reared eternally against an abyss of empty space. And it plunged beneath further than thought could fathom into a sea of death. The cliff was the world, and line upon line, like the minutely fretted ledges of a coral reef, the human generations emerged, just above the last sea-level, like a desperate striving crepitation