Owen bade the cottagers good-night and climbed up the hillside again.  The lights were burning in the boy’s dormitory, so Evelyn must still be there, and finding a large stone among the rough ground where he could sit he waited for her, interested in the round moon, looking like the engraved dial of some great clock, and in the grey valley and the sullen sky passing overhead into a dim blueness, in which he could detect a star here and there.  The evening hummed a little still, and the sounds of voices, the last sounds to die out of a landscape, became rare and faint.  One by one the gossiping folk under the hill crept within doors, and Owen was so absorbed by the silence that he did not hear Evelyn approaching; and when she spoke he hardly answered her, and she, as if participating already in his emotion, stood by him, not asking for words from him, looking with him into the solitude of the valley, seeking to see beyond the veils of blue mist gathering and blotting out all detail, creeping up intimately tender.  What could he say to her worth saying at such a moment? he began to ask himself; and just then a song came from a hawthorn growing by the edge of the hill, a solitary song, mysterious and strange, a passionate strain which freed their souls, till, walking about this dusky hillside, the lovers seemed to lose their bodies and to become all spirit; and they walked on in silence, speech seeming a sacrilege.

“So now you are going to settle down at Riversdale; your travels are over?”

“Yes, they are over.  I shall travel no more.  I didn’t find what I sought.”

“And what was that?”

And her words as she spoke them sounded to Owen passionate, tender, and melancholy as the nightingale; and his words, too, seemed to partake of the same passionate melancholy.

“Forgetfulness of you.”

“So you wished to forget me?  I am sorry.”

“Sorry that I haven’t forgotten you?  That, Evelyn, is impossible for me to believe; it isn’t human to wish ourselves forgotten.”

“No, Owen, I don’t wish you to forget me, I am glad you have not; but I am sorry there was any need for you to seek forgetfulness.”

“And is there any need?”

“Yes, for the Evelyn you loved died years ago.”

“Oh, Evelyn, don’t say that; she is not dead?”

“Perhaps not altogether, a trace here and there, a slight flavour, but not a woman who could bring you happiness as you understand happiness, Owen.”

“All the happiness I ever had I owe to you.  How can I thank you for those ten years?”

“But you paid for them with a great deal of sorrow.”

“Had it not been for you, Evelyn, I shouldn’t have lived at all.  How often have I told you that?  I have seen all the world, and yet I have only seen one thing in the world—­you.”

“Owen, you mustn’t speak to me like that.”

“While that bird is singing you are afraid to listen to me!  How passionately it sings, but how little it feels compared with what I am feeling.  Why did you say that the Evelyn of old is dead?”