The evening lengthened out into long, clear hours and thoughts of the green lanes; and to escape from hauntings of Owen—­the music-room it seemed still to hold echoes of his voice—­she asked him to walk out with her.  They wandered in the cloudless evening.  They sauntered past the picture gallery, and the fact that she was walking with this strange and somewhat ambiguous young man provoked her to think of herself and him as a couple from that politely wanton assembly which had collected at eventide to watch a pavane danced beneath the beauty of a Renaissance colonnade, and to accentuate the resemblance Evelyn fluttered her parasol and said, pointing across the yellow meadows—­

“Look at those idle clouds, the afternoon is falling asleep.”

She walked for some time touched with the sentiment that the evening landscape inspired, a little uncertain whether he would like to talk further about his spiritual nature, and whether she should rest contented with what she knew on that subject.  “It is only curiosity, but I wonder how he would make love—­how he’d begin?  I wonder if he cares for women?” It was some time before she could get Ulick to talk of himself; he seemed to strive to change the conversation back to artistic questions.  He seemed absorbed in himself; it seemed difficult to awaken him out of his absent-mindedness.  At last he spoke suddenly, as was his habit, and she learned that the scene of his first love-making was a beautiful Normandy park.  He was more explicit about the park than the lady, and he seemed to lay special stress on the fact that the great saloon in the castle was hung with a faded tapestry.  The story seemed to Evelyn a little obscure, but she gathered that Ulick had been tragically separated from her, whether by the intervention of another woman or through his own fault did not seem clear.  The story was vague as a legend, and Evelyn was not certain that Ulick had not invented the park and the tapestries as characteristic decorations of a love story as it should happen to him, if it did happen.

Love as a theme did not seem to suit him; he seemed to fade from her; he was only real when he spoke of his ideas, and a fleeting comparison between him and herself passed across her mind.  She remembered that she was no longer truly herself except when speaking of sexual emotion.  Everything else had begun to seem to her trivial, trite and uninteresting.  She could no longer take an interest in ordinary topics of conversation.  If a man was not going to make love to her, she soon began to lose interest....  A long sequence of possibilities rose in her mind, and died away in the distance like flights of birds.  Suddenly she began to sing, and they had a long and interesting talk about her rendering of Isolde in the first act.  For a moment the love potion seemed as if it would carry the conversation back to their individual experiences of the essential passion; but they drifted instead into a discussion regarding the