she felt to be hers.  She could not refrain from this idolatrous act; but in her bed at night, thinking of the flowers and the star, she had believed herself mad or very wicked; for nothing in the world would she have had anyone know her folly, and she remembered the agony it had been to her to confess it.  But now she heard that she had been acting according to the sense of the wisdom of generations.  As he had said, “according to the immortal atavism of man.”

With her ordinary work-a-day intelligence, she felt that the stars could not possibly be concerned in our miserable existence.  But deep down in her being someone who was not herself, but who seemed inseparable from her, and over whom she had no slightest control, seemed to breathe throughout her entire being an affirmation of her celestial dependency.  She could catch no words, merely a vague, immaterial destiny like distant music; and her ears filled with a wailing certitude of an inseverable affinity with the stars, and she longed to put off this shameful garb of flesh and rise to her spiritual destiny of which the stars are our watchful guardians.  It was like deep music; words could not contain it, it was a deep and indistinct yearning for the stars—­for spiritual existence.  She was conscious of the narrowness of the prison-house into which Owen had shut her, and looking at Ulick, she felt the thrill of liberation; it was like a ray of light dividing the dark.  Looking at Ulick, she was startled by the conviction of his indispensability in her life, and the knowledge that she must repel him was an acute affliction, a desolate despair.  It seemed cruel and disastrous that she might not love him, for it was only through love that she could get to understand him, and life without knowledge of him seemed failure.

“I’m very fond of you, Ulick, but I mustn’t let you kiss me.  Can’t we be friends?”

He sat leaning a little forward, his head bent and his eyes on the carpet.  He represented to her an abysmal sorrow—­an extraordinary despair.  She longed to share this sorrow, to throw her arms about him and make him glad.  Their love seemed so good and natural, she was surprised that she might not.

“Ulick.”

“Yes, Evelyn.”

He looked round the room, saw it was getting late, and that it was time for him to go.

“Yes, it is getting late.  I suppose you must go.  But you’ll come to see me again.  We shall be friends, promise me that ... that whatever happens we shall be friends.”

“I think that we shall always be friends, I feel that.”

His answer seemed to her insufficient, and they stood looking at each other.  When the door closed after him, Evelyn turned away, thinking that if he had stayed another moment she must have thrown herself into his arms.

CHAPTER TWENTY