ongs for the
children.

"So she sings for the children? She used to do that in Italy."

"Has she been in Italy, sir?"

To interest them he told how Evelyn had sung in all the opera houses
of Europe; and then, fearing his confessions were indiscreet, he
asked the woman nearest him if she was the mother of the little boy
Evelyn had taken to live with her.

"No, sir, 'e is Mrs. Watney's son in the next cottage." And Owen
moved away to interrogate Mrs. Watney, who told him that her son was
not a cripple.

"'Is limbs be sound enough, only the poor little chap 'ad the
small-pox badly when he was four, and 'as been blind ever since. A
extraordinary 'appy child; and Miss Innes has promised to 'ave him
taught the pianna."

"A piano-tuner must have a good ear, and Miss Innes says his ear is
perfect. He'll whistle anything he hears."

Owen bade the cottagers good-night and climbed up the hillside again.
The lights were burning in the boy's dormitory, so Evelyn must still
be there, and finding a large stone among the rough ground where he
could sit he waited for her, interested in the round moon, looking
like the engraved dial of some great clock, and in the grey valley
and the sullen sky passing overhead into a dim blueness, in which he
could detect a star here and there. The evening hummed a little
still, and the sounds of voices, the last sounds to die out of a
landscape, became rare and faint. One by one the gossiping folk under
the hill crept within doors, and Owen was so absorbed by the silence
that he did not hear Evelyn approaching; and when she spoke he hardly
answered her, and she, as if participating already in his emotion,
stood by him, not asking for words from him, looking with him into
the solitude of the valley, seeking to see beyond the veils of blue
mist gathering and blotting out all detail, creeping up intimately
tender. What could he say to her worth saying at such a moment? he
began to ask himself; and just then a song came from a hawthorn
growing by the edge of the hill, a solitary song, mysterious and
strange, a passionate strain which freed their souls, till, walking
about this dusky hillside, the lovers seemed to lose their bodies and
to become all spirit; and they walked on in silence, speech seeming a
sacrilege.

"So now you are going to settle down at Riversdale; your travels are
over?"

"Yes, they are over. I shall travel no more. I didn't find what I
sought."

"And what was that?"

A