Another bird answered far away out of the stillness, the same sweet strain it was; and listening, they seemed to hear the same strain within their hearts—­a silent, mysterious song.  All the world seemed singing the same sweet strain of melancholy, now when the moon passed out of the dusk—­shining high up in the heavens, with stars above and beneath—­Owen thought of some mysterious music-maker.  Flocks of various coloured stars, flaming Jupiter high up in the sky, red Mars low down in the horizon, the Great Bear beautifully distinct, the polar star at an angle—­the star whereby Owen used to steer.  All the world seemed to be going to the same sweet strain, the soul, seemingly freed, rose to the lips, and, in her pride, sought words wherewith to tell the passionate melancholy of the night and of life.  But the soul could not tell it; only the nightingale, who, without knowing it, was singing what the soul may only feel.

“The bird is telling me what your voice used to tell me long ago.”

The lovers wandered through the garden, suffused with delicate scents, and Owen told her of the legend of the nightingale and the swallow, a legend coming down from some barbaric age, from a king called Pandion, who, despite his wife’s beauty, fell in love with her sister, and ravished her in some town in Thessaly, the name of which Owen could not remember.  Fearing, however, that his lust would reach his wife’s ears, Pandion cut out the girl’s tongue.  This barbarous act, committed before Greece was, had been redeemed by the Grecian spirit, which had added that the girl; though without tongue to tell the cruel deed, had, nevertheless, hands wherewith to weave it.  The weft of her misfortune only inspired another barbarous deed:  Pandion killed both sisters and his son Italus.  Again the Grecian spirit touched the legend, changing the tongueless girl into a swallow, a bird with a little cry, and fleet wings to carry its cry all over the world, and the unhappy wife into the bird “which sleeps all day and sings all night.”  “Sophocles,” Owen said, “speaks of the nightingale as moaning all the night in ivy clusters, moaning or humming.  A strange expression his seems to us, our musical sense being different from that of the antique world, if the antique world really possessed any musical sense.”  The lovers wandered round the house, listening to the bird’s sweet singing, stopping at the hill’s steep side so that they might listen better.

“Now the bird is telling of sorrows other than ours—­isn’t that so, Evelyn?  I don’t seem to recognise anything of ourselves in its song; it is singing a new song.”

“Perhaps,” Evelyn answered, “now it is singing the sadness of the mother under the hill for her son.”

“I went to see her, she is not unhappy; she is happy that her son is With you.”

“But another child died last year; and for her, if she is listening, the bird is certainly singing the death of that child.”