Symbolism alerts us that Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley's second idyll now nears its conclusion. Winter, nature's cease-fire, is at an end. "In the night it started raining," Henry tells us, reporting that it does so even high up on the mountain. Of the train trip to Lausanne, he reports that "Looking out the window toward where we had lived you could not see the mountains for the clouds." Thus there is no longer any refuge for the couple from death. The question at this point is, is it the death of their love affair? Or that of their unborn child? It is not clear yet, but the sense of foreboding in Chapter XL is so extreme as to be almost unbearable.
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