to sing, and watched her at his feet listening to him with an avidity which was enchanting, making him feel that there was nothing in the world but he and she.  She had once said, enchanting him with the admission, for it was so true, that if she were alone with a man for an evening he must hate her very much if he was not to fall in love with her.  On reminding her of her saying she admitted that she had forgotten it.  It seemed to him that his dead mistress had come to life again.  Her eyes shone with something of their old light, and he said to himself, “The convent has faded out of her mind and out of her face.”  Interpenetrated with her sweet atmosphere, which had for ever haunted him, he breathed like one who hears music going by.  Every moment was a surprise.  The next great surprise being the discovery that the convent had not quelled the daring of her thought—­it came and went swallow-like, as before.

“Because there were no men in the convent.  Though I am virtuous, Owen, and must remain so, I can’t live without men.  If I am deprived of men’s society for a few days I wilt.”

The picture of herself painted in these few words, Evelyn wilting amid the treble of the nuns like a plant in an uncongenial soil, delighted Owen, enabling him to forget the sad fact that she was virtuous and would have to remain so.  For she was still his Evelyn, a hero worshipper, with man for her hero always, even though it were a priest.  A moment of the thought caused him a sigh, but he was in the seventh heaven when she told him the first letter she had written when she left the convent was for him.  He had maligned her in thinking the past had no meaning for her.  For who was so faithful to her friends?  Again he forgot everything but himself sitting by her, seeing her bright eyes, listening to her voice, absorbed by her atmosphere; and talking and listening by turns he was carried away in a delicious oblivion of everything except the sensation of the moment.  It seemed to him like floating down the current of some enchanted river; but even in enchanted rivers there are eddies, otherwise the enchantment of the current and the flowery banks under which it flows would become monotonous, and presently Owen was caught in an eddy.  The stream flowed gaily while he told her of his experience in the desert; she was interested in the gazelles and in the eagles, though qualifying the sport as cruel, and in his synthesis of the desert—­a desire for a drink of clean water.  Nor did she resent his allusion to his meeting with Ulick at Dowlands, interrupting him, however, to tell him that Ulick had married Louise.

“Married Louise!”

Louise!  What an evocation of past times was in this name!  And their talk passed into a number of little sallies.

“Well, he’ll spend a great deal of her money for her.”

“No, he is doing pretty well for himself.”