“Begin, ye Sicilian Muses, begin the Dirge!”

And Evelyn listened, saying, “How very beautiful! how very wonderful!”

“But you believe, Evelyn, that we do live again?”

“It is too late to argue that question; it is nearly midnight.  I hope you will like your room.  Eliza has unstrapped your portmanteau, I see.  Your bed is comfortable, I think.”

It surprised him that she should follow him into his room, and stand there talking to him, talking even about the bed he was to sleep in.  It would have been easy to lay his hands upon her shoulder, saying, “Evelyn, are we to be parted?” but something held him back.  And he listened to her story of the buying of the bed, hearing that it had been forgotten in the interest excited by the rumour of certain portfolios filled with engravings supposed to be of great value.  The wardrobe, too, had been bought at the same auction, and he looked into its panels, praising them.

“But you want more light.”  She went over and lighted the candles on the dressing-table, accomplishing the duties of hostess quite unconcerned, ignoring the past.  “One would think she had forgotten it,” he said to himself.  “Are we to part like this?  But it is for her to decide.  So quiet, so self-contained; it doesn’t seem even to occur to her.”  He waited, incapable of speech or action, paralysed, till she bade him good-night.  As soon as the door closed, or a moment after, he began to realise his mistake.  What he should have done was to lay his hand upon her shoulder and lead her to the window-seat, and sit with her there till a greyness came into the sky and a cold air rustled in the trees.  “Of course, of course,” he muttered, for he could see himself and her in the dawn together, united again and tasting again in a kiss infinity.  In her kiss he had tasted that unity, that binding together of the mortal to the immortal, of the finite to the infinite, which Paracelsus—­He tried to recall the words, “He who tastes a crust of bread has tasted of the universe, even to the furthest star.”  She had always been his universe, and he had always believed that she had come out of the star-shine like a goddess when it pleases Divinity to lie with a mortal.  Of this he was sure, that he had never kissed her except in this belief....  This had sanctified their love, whereas other men knew love as an animal satisfaction.  It had always seemed to him that there was something essential in her, something which had always been in human nature and which always would be.  This light, this joy, and this aspiration he had seen in certain moments:  when she walked on the stage as Elizabeth or Elza, she had always seemed to reflect a little of that light which floats down through the generations ... illuminating “the liquid surface of man’s life.”  But a change had come, darkening that light, causing it to pass, at least into eclipse.  He drew his hand across his eyes—­a phase of her life was hidden from him; yet it, too, may