“And then later, as the ambulance went faster, Abel felt not fear but a strange exquisite joy, the bliss of things finally and irretrievably out of his control, unpeeled, unpeeling now. Yet there was a streak of something else, as though just outside his reach was the twinkle of a light, as though a Christmas window was there; this puzzled him and pleased him, and in his state of tired ecstasy it seemed almost to come to him.”
