“Ah, the old man knew what he was doing,” she said; “he had marked this passage to be sung gloomily, and by gloomily he meant infinite lassitude.”  But this intention had not been grasped, and the singers had either sung it without any particular expression, or with a stupid stage expression which meant if possible something less than nothing.  “Then, you see, if I sing the first half of the first act as wearily as the music allows me, I shall get a contrast—­an Isolde who has not drunk the love potion.  The love potion is of course only a symbol of her surrender to her desire.”

Ulick would have liked to have gone through the whole of the music of the act with her.  It was only in this way that he could get an idea of how her reading would work out.  But in that moment each read in the other’s eyes an avowal of which they were immediately ashamed, and which they tried to dissimulate.

“I am tired.  We won’t have any more music this evening.”

His thoughts seemed to pass suddenly from her, and then, without her being aware how it began, she found herself listening intently to him.  He was talking in that strange, rhythmical chant of his about the primal melancholy of man, and his remote past always insurgent in him.  Although she did not quite understand, perhaps because she did not quite understand, she was carried away far out of all reason, and it seemed to her that she could listen for ever.  Nor could she clearly see out of her eyes, and she felt all power of resistance dissolve within her.  He might have taken her in his arms and kissed her then; but though sitting by her, he seemed a thousand miles away; his remoteness chastened her, and she asked him of what he was thinking.

“When your father used to speak of you, I used to see you; sometimes I used to fancy I heard you.  I did hear you once sing in a dream.”

“What was I singing?  Wagner?”

“No; something quite different.  I forgot it all as I awoke except the last notes.  I seemed to have returned from the future—­you seemed in the end to lose your voice....  I cannot tell you—­I forget.”

“It is very sad; how sad such feelings are.”

“But I never doubted that I should meet you, that our destinies were knit together—­for a time at least.”

She wanted to ask him by what signs do we recognise the moment that we are destined to meet the one that is more important to us than all the world.  But she could find no way of asking this question that would not betray her.  She could not put it so that Ulick would fail to read some application of the question to herself, and to himself.  So it seemed strange indeed that he should, as if in answer to her unexpressed thought, say that the instinct of man is to consult the stars.  She remembered the evenings when she used to go into the patch of black garden and gaze at the stars till her brain reeled.  She used even to gather the daffodils and place them on the wall in homage to the star which