“Well, Owen, don’t you know that we are always dying, always changing.  You are in love, not with me, but with your memory of me.”

“A great deal of my love is memory, of course, still—­”

Words again seemed vain, foolish, even sacrilegious, so little could he convey to her of what he believed to be the truth, and they walked in silence through the fragrance of the soft night, thinking of the colour of the sky, in which the sunset was not yet quite dead.  His memory of his love of this woman long ago in Dulwich, in Paris, and in all the cities and scenes they had visited together, raised him above himself; and he felt that her soul mingled with his in an ecstatic sadness beyond words, but which the nightingale sang clearly; the stars, too, sang it clearly; and they stood mute in the midst of the immortal symphony about them.  “Evelyn, I love you.  How wonderful our lives have been!” But what use to break the music, audible and inaudible, with such weak words?  The villagers under the hill could speak as well; the bird in the bush and the stars above it were speaking for him; and he was content to listen.

The silence of the night grew more intense, there were millions of stars, small and great, and the moon now shone amidst them alone, “of different birth,” divided from them for ever as he was divided from this woman, whose arm touched his as they walked through the darkness, divided for ever, unable to communicate his soul to hers.  Did she understand what he was feeling—­the mystery of their lives written in the stars, sung by the nightingale and breathed by the flowers?  Did she understand?  Had the convent rule left her sufficient sensibility to understand such simple human truths?

“How sweetly the tobacco plant smells!” she said.

“Yes, doesn’t it?  But what is the meaning of our story?  My finding you at Dulwich—­Evelyn, have you ever thought enough about it?  How extraordinary that event was, extraordinary as the stars above us; my going down that evening and hearing you sing?  Do you remember the look with which you greeted me—­do you remember that cup of tea?”

“It was coffee.”

“And then all our meetings in the garden under the cedar-tree?”

“You used to say we looked like a picture by Marcus Stone when we sat under it.”

“Never mind what we looked like.  Think of it!  Of our journey to Paris, and my visit to Brussels to hear you sing.”

“And Madame Savelli, who wouldn’t let me speak to you; she said I might tire my voice.”

“Yes, how I hated her and Olive that day!  You sang ‘Elizabeth,’ and when you walked up, to the sound of flutes and clarionettes,’ seemingly to the stars, there was something in the way you did it that put a fear into my heart.  It was all predestined from the beginning.”

“So you believe, Owen, that the end is fated, and that I was created to come back after many wanderings to help these poor little crippled boys?”