I laughed and watched her face as it lay against me, and I saw her eyes half-closed as she gazed dreaming into the sunshine.

Faint pink clouds sailed across the sky at intervals like downy feathers blown before a breeze; the flycatcher continued its chattering song to us, some bees hummed with a warm summer-like sound over the wall.

An hour slipped by and seemed only like one golden moment.  We heard a bell jangle from the direction of the house, and when I looked at my watch I saw it was time to dress for dinner.

When we retraced our steps the whole garden was bathed in rosy light and the lilac stood out in it curiously and poured forth a wonderful, heavy fragrance as we passed.

The voice of spring, that beautiful low whisper with its promise of summer and cloudless days was in all the air.  Had we been married several years I do not think either Viola or I would have found Mrs. Jevons’s cooking good nor praised the dinner that night; the attendance also might have been condemned.  But as it was we were in that magic mirage of first days together and everything seemed perfect.

When it was over we sought the outside again and sat watching the now paling rose of the sky being replaced by clear, tender green.  A passion and rapture of song, the last evening song of the birds, was being poured out on the still dewy air all round us.  One by one the songsters grew tired and ceased as a pale star grew visible here and there in the transparent sky, and complete silence fell on the garden.  Only a bat flitted across it silently now and then, and the white night-moths came and played by us.  I had my arm round her waist and I drew her close to me and looked down upon her through the dusky twilight.

“Let us go, too, dearest, it is quite late.”

She looked up, the colour waving all over her face, and smiled back at me, and we went in and upstairs.

When we reached our room, the window was wide open as we had left it and the room seemed full of soft violet gloom, heavy with fragrance of the lilac that shewed its pale mauve stars through the shadows.

It was so beautiful, the effect of the deep summer twilight, that I told her not to light the candles.

“Shew yourself to me in this wonderful mysterious half-light, nothing can be more beautiful.”

I sat down on the foot of the bed watching her, my heart beating, every pulse within me throbbing with delight.

Viola did not answer.  She did not light the candles, but with the rustle of falling silk and lace began her undressing.

That night I could not sleep.  The window stood open, and the room was filled with the soft mysterious twilight of the summer night with its thousand wandering perfumes, its tiny sounds of bats and whirring wings.

The cherry bloom thrust its long, white, scented arms into the room.  I lay looking towards the white square of the window wide-eyed and thinking.