were nearly of the same age, and were conscious of it; a generation is but a large family, united by ties of impulse and idea.  Evelyn had been brought up and had lived outside of the influence of her own generation.  Now it was flashed upon her for the first time, and under the spell of its instincts she ran down the steps to the railway and jumped into the moving train.  Owen would have forbidden her this little recklessness, but Ulick accepted it as natural, and they sat opposite each other, their thoughts lost in the rustle and confusion of their blood.  She was conscious of a delicious inward throbbing, and she liked the smooth young face, the colour of old ivory, and the dark, fixed eyes into which she could not look without trembling; they changed, lighting up and clouding as his thought came and went.  She found an attraction in his occasional absent-mindedness, and wondered of what he was thinking.  Looking into his eyes, she was aware of a mystery half understood, and she could not but feel that this enigma, this mystery, was essential to her.  Her life seemed to depend upon it; she seemed to have come upon the secret at last.

It was amusing to walk home to dinner together this bright summer’s day, and to tell this young man, to whose intervention it pleased her to think that she owed her reconciliation to her father, how it was by pretending not to understand the new harpsichord that she had inveigled her father into speaking to her....  But it was only one o’clock—­an hour still remained before dinner would be ready at Dowlands, and they were glad to dream it under the delicious chestnut trees.  She sat intent, moving the tiny bloom from side to side with her parasol, thinking of her father.  Suddenly she told Ulick of the Wotan and Brunnhilde scene, which she had always played, while thinking of the real scene that one day awaited her at her father’s feet, and this scene she had at last acted, if you could call reality acting.  She was dimly aware of the old Dulwich street, and that she had once trundled her hoop there, and the humble motion of life beneath the chestnut trees, the loitering of stout housewives and husbands in Sunday clothes, the spare figures of spinsters who lived in the damp houses which lay at the back of the choked gardens was accepted as a suitable background for her happiness.  Her joy seemed to dilate in the morning, in the fluttering sensation of the sunshine, of summer already begun in the distant fields.  Inspired by the scene, Ulick began to hum the old English air, “Summer is a-coming in,” and without raising her eyes from the chestnut blooms that fell incessantly on the pavement, Evelyn said—­“That monk had a beautiful dream.”

And for a while they thought of that monk at Reading composing for his innocent recreation that beautiful piece of music; they hummed it together, thinking of his quiet monastery, and it seemed to them that it would be a beautiful thing if life were over, if it might pass away, as that monk’s life had passed, in peace, in aspiration whether of prayer or of art.  Thinking of the music she had heard over night, that she had hummed through and that her father had played on the harpsichord, she said—­“And you, too, had a beautiful dream when you wrote ’Connla and the Fairy Maiden’?”