“Is that the meaning of it all, Evelyn?”

“Maybe—­who knows?—­that meaning as well as another.”  And through the dusk he could see her eyes shining with something of their old light.

“Was it fated from the beginning that I should only, meet you here to part with you again?  Is that the meaning you read in the song of the nightingale, in the stare of the moon and the perfume of the garden?  There is a meaning, Evelyn, in our lives for certain, but are you reading it aright?”

For a moment the meaning of their lives seemed clear to them.  Life had a meaning! for a moment, they were both sure of it; they had met for something, there was a design in life, and though they were separated on earth they seemed to move in celestial circles, just as the stars moved in that great design above them, each sphere rolling on, filled with love for its sister sphere, guided and controlled each by the other, yet always apart.  Owen walked thinking how, billions of years hence, all those lights might wax into one light, all souls to one soul, all ends to one end.  For one moment he Height possess Evelyn’s soul as he had never been able to possess it on earth... perhaps.

“I love you now just as much as I loved you before, perhaps more, for there is memory to aid me.”

“You are in love with memory, not with me.”

Her words went to his heart, as the thorn of the rose is said to go to the nightingale’s heart, and, unable to answer her, he listened.  “How wonderfully the bird sings, the interpreter of the primal melancholy from which we never escape... since the beginning of time, its interpreter.”

“Is he telling his own story, or is he telling ours?”

“Both, for all love songs are as ours, made of the same intense passionate melancholy.  Why is love the most melancholy of all joys?  With what passionate melancholy he enchants her who is sitting in the nest close by!  The origin of art is sex; woman is a reed, and our desire—­”

“Hush!  Listen to the nightingale!  His discourse is better than yours.”

“How absorbed he is in his song, stave after stave; he seems to say, ‘You want more tunes?  If that is all, you shall have more.’  Hush!” And they listened to the rich warble, sounding so strange in the midst of the lonely country.  “A love-call of three notes, which he repeats before passing into cadenzas.  Hush!” The bird started again, and this time as if encouraged by the success of his last efforts.

“What flutings!  What trills!  What runs!  Pearls and jewels scattered.  Little tunes of three or four notes, casting a spell about the hillside, followed by passionate cadenzas.”