“I know no reason, except that you don’t care for me.”

“But you know that isn’t so.”

“Come, dearest, be reasonable.  You’re not going to stop here all your life playing the viola da gamba.  The hour of departure has come,” he said, perceiving her very thought; “be reasonable, come and see me to-morrow.  Come to lunch, and I’ll arrange.  You know that you—­”

“Yes, I believe that,” she said, in response to a change which had come into her appreciation.  “But can I trust myself?  Suppose I did go away, and repented and left you.  Where should I go?  I could not come back here.  Father would forgive me, I daresay, but I could not come back here.”

“‘Repented,’ Those are fairy tales,” he said lifting her gold hair from her ear and kissing it.  “A woman does not leave the man who adores her.”

“You told me they often did.”

“How funny you are....  They do sometimes, but not because they repent.”

Her head was on his shoulder, and she stood looking at him a long while without speaking.

“Then you do love me, dearest?  Tell me so again.”

Kissing her gently on the mouth and eyes, he answered—­

“You know very well that I do.  Come and see me to-morrow.  Say you will, for I must go now.”

“Go now!”

“Do you know what time it is?  It is past seven.”

She followed him to the gate of the little garden.  The lamps were lighted far away in the suburbs.  Again he asked her to come and see him.

“I cannot to-morrow; to-morrow will be Sunday.”

His footsteps echoed through the chill twilight, and seeing a thin moon afloat like a feather in the sky, she thought of Omar’s moon, that used to seek the lovers in their garden, and that one evening sought one of them in vain.

CHAPTER EIGHT

There was no other place except the picture gallery where they could see each other alone.  But the dignity of Velasquez and the opulence of Rubens distracted their thoughts, and they were ill at ease on a backless seat in front of a masterpiece.  Owen regretted the Hobbema; it was less aggressive than the colonnade.  A sun-lit clearing in a wood and a water mill raised no moral question.  He turned his eyes from the dancers, but however he resisted them, their frivolous life found its way into the conversation.  They were the wise ones, he said.  They lived for art and love, and what else was there in life?  A few sonatas, a few operas, a few pictures, a few books, and a love story; we had always to come back to that in the end.  He spoke with conviction, his only insincerity being the alteration of a plural into a singular.  But no, he did not think he had lied; he had spoken what seemed to him the truth at the present moment.  Had he used the singular instead of the plural a fortnight ago, he would have lied, but within the last week his feelings for Evelyn had