He hung his head.  He did not want her to see how immense was the temptation.  He murmured some half-audible, agitated thanks, but his refusal was made quite plain.  He could not give up the advantage he had counted on.  “I’m afraid I must bore you again a little now.  I’ve only got an hour.”

“Don’t spoil it, then.  See how beautiful it is.”

She rose and threw open the lattice, and they stood together for a moment looking out.  It was about an hour before sunset, an April sunset, the golden consummation of the wedding of heaven and earth.  He felt a delicate vibration in the air, the last tender resonance of the nuptial song.  This April was not the April of the streets where the great wooing of the world goes on with violence and clangour; for the city is earth turned to stone and yields herself struggling and unwilling to the invasion of the sky.  Here all the beautiful deep-bosomed land lay still, breathless in her escape from the wind to the sun.  Up the western valley the earth gave all her greenness naked to the light; but the hills were dim with the divine approaches of her mystical union, washed by the undivided streams of blue and purple air that flowed to the thin spiritual verge, where earth is caught up and withdrawn behind heaven’s inmost veil.

The hour was beautiful as she had said.  Its beauty had clothed itself with immortality in light; yet there was in it such mortal tenderness as drew his heart after it and melted his will in longing.  He turned from the window and looked at her with all his trouble in his eyes.

Lucia saw that her words had saddened him, and she sat still, devising some comfort for him in her heart.

“I don’t think,” he said at last, “you quite know what you are doing.  I’m going to tell you something that I didn’t mean to tell you.  When I said I’d had nothing to do with all this, it wasn’t altogether true.”

“So I supposed,” she murmured.

“There was a—­a certain amount of trouble and difficulty about it—­”

“And what did that mean?”

“It only meant that I had to work rather hard to put it right.  I liked it, so you needn’t think anything of that.  But if you persist in your refusal all my hard work goes for nothing.”  He was so powerless against her tender obstinacy that he had determined to appeal to her tenderness alone.  “There were about three years of it, the best three years out of my life; and you are going to fling them away and make them useless.  All for a little wretched scruple.  This is the only argument that will appeal to you; or I wouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“The best years out of your life—­why were they the best?”

“Because they were the first in which I was free.”

She thought of the time nine years ago when she had taken from him three days, the only days when he was free, and how she had tried to make restitution and had failed.  “And whatever else I refuse,” she said, “I’ve taken them?  I can’t get out of that?”