It seemed so shameful that he should suffer like this, and she strove to rouse herself out of her stony determination.  She was like one upon a rampart; she could see the surrounding country, but could not escape to it; this rampart was the instinct, in which Nature had shut her soul.  But she could not bear to see him cry.

“Oh, Evelyn, this cannot be.”

Then, feeling that the reality was too brutal, she yielded to the temptation to disguise the truth.

“I don’t know what I shall do, Owen; there would be no use making promises.”

“Then you do love me a little, Evelyn?”

“Yes, Owen, you must never doubt that.  I shall always be fond of you; remember that, whatever happens.”

“Yes, I know, as a friend.  Look round! the earth and the sky are quiet, and one day we shall be quiet too, only that is sure.”

As they walked towards the house, their self-consciousness rose to so high a pitch that the park and house seemed to them like a thin illusion, a sort of painted paper reality, which might fall to pieces at any moment.  He thought how little were the hours between the present moment and the moment when she would be taken from him.  Whereas she was thinking that these hours would never pass.  She realised the long hours before the sunlight waned.  She thought of their lonely dinner and their evening after it.  All that while she would witness his grief for the love that had gone from her, a love which she could no more give than she could once withhold.  The great green park lay before their eyes, they strayed through the woods talking of her Isolde.  He had not seen the performance.  He had been called away the day she played it, but his pockets were full of the articles that had been written about her.  The leaves of the beech trees shimmered in the steady sunlight, and they could see the green park through the drooping branches.  She often detected a sob in his voice, and once, while sitting under a cedar tree at the edge of the terrace, he had to turn aside to hide his tears, and the sadness of everything made her sick and ill.

They had tea in the west hall.  Owen had ceased to complain, and she had begun to think that she could not give him up entirely.

The day had passed somehow; dinner was over.  Around the green park the last light of the sunset grew narrower, and the cattle faded mysteriously into the gathering gloom.  Owen held converse with himself, but with recognition of the fact that he was listened to by the second subject of his discourse, and that they themselves were his ideas, the figuration of his teaching, endowed his philosophy with a dramatic intensity.