ould always say,
'Well, my good man, go to So-and-so, she will sing for you any parts
you please'; but I can only sing the parts I like."

"You think, then, that if you had lived the life of a real actress,
working your way up from the bottom, what has happened wouldn't have
happened; is that what you mean?"

"It is impossible for me to answer you. One would have to live one's
life over again."

"I suppose no one will ever know how much depends upon the gift we
bring into the world with us, and how much upon circumstances," and
Owen compared the gift to the father's seed and circumstances to the
mother's womb.

"So you are quite determined?" And they philosophised as they went,
on life and its meaning, on death and love, admiring the temples
which an eighteenth-century generation had built on the hillsides.
"Here are eight pillars on either side and four at either end,
serving no purpose whatever, not even shelter from the rain. Never
again in this world will people build things for mere beauty," Owen
said, and they passed into the depths of the wood, discovering
another temple, and in it a lad and lass.

"You see these temples do serve for something. Why are we not
lovers?" And they passed on again, Owen's heart filled with his
sorrow and Evelyn's with her determination.

She was leaving by the one train, and when they got back to the house
the carriage was waiting for her.

"Good-bye, Owen."

"Am I not to see you again?"

"Yes, you will see me one of these days."

"And that was all the promise she could make me," he said, rushing
into Lady Ascott's boudoir, disturbing her in the midst of her
letters. "So ends a _liaison_ which has lasted for more than ten
years. Good God, had I known that she would have spoken to me like
this when I saw her in Dulwich!"

Even so he felt he would have acted just as he had acted, and he went
to his room thinking that the rest of his life would be
recollection. "She is still in the train, going away from me, intent
on her project, absorbed in her desire of a new life ... this
haunting which has come upon her."

III

And so it was. Evelyn lay back in the corner of the railway carriage
thinking about the poor people, and about the nuns, about herself,
about the new life which she was entering upon, and which was dearer
to her than anything else. She grew a little frightened at the
hardness of her heart. "It certainly does harden one's heart," she
said; "my heart is