When they had completed once more the round of the garden, the bird seemed to have again changed his intervals; a gaiety seemed to have come into his singing, and Owen said: 

“Now his music is lighter; he is singing an inveigling little story, the story of first love.  Look, Evelyn, do you see that boy and girl walking under the hedge with their arms entwined?  They, too, have stopped to listen to the nightingale, but the song they really hear comes out of their own hearts.”

Then the song changed, suddenly acquiring a strange, voluptuous accent, which carried Owen’s thoughts back to a night when he had been awakened out of his sleep by a woman’s voice singing, and, starting up in bed, he had listened, rousing himself sufficiently from sleep to distinguish that the voice he was listening to was Evelyn’s.  The song was a love-call, and, believing it to be such, he had thrown aside the curtain, and had found her leaning out of her window, singing the Star Song, not to the evening star, as in the opera, but to the morning star shining white like a diamond out of the dawning of the sky.  The valley under the castle walls was submerged in mist, and the distant hillside was indistinguishable.  The castle seemed to stand by the side of some frozen sea, so intense was the silence.  He had always looked back upon this morning as one of the great moments of his life, and going to her room like going to some great religious rite.  Each man must worship where he finds the Godhead.

“Who knows,” he said to Evelyn, “that the bird in the nest close by does not listen with the same rapture—­”

“As you, in the box, used to listen to me on the stage?  For the comparison to hold good, I should have sung Italian music, roulades.  Listen to those cadenzas!”

“How melancholy are their gaieties!”

“Yes, aren’t they?” she answered.  “How poignant the two notes!—­with which il commence son grand air.”

“But our love-call ended years ago,” she said, with an accent of regret in her voice.  And they walked towards the house, Owen dreading that some sudden impulse might throw her into his arms and her mind might be unhinged again, and he would lose her utterly.  So he spoke to her of the first; thing that came into her mind, and what came first was a memory of Moschus’s lament for Bion and the brevity of human life as contrasted with the long life of the world.

“‘The mallows wither in the garden, and the green parsley—­’ how does it go?” And he tried to remember as they went upstairs. “’The mallows wither in the garden—­’ no, that is not how it begins.  ’Ah me! when the mallows wither in the garden, and the green parsley, and the curled tendrils of the anise, on a later day these live again and spring in another year; but we men, we, the great and mighty, or wise, when once we have died in the hollow earth we sleep, gone down into silence, a fight long and endless and unawakening sleep.”