ough they were
separated on earth they seemed to move in celestial circles, just as
the stars moved in that great design above them, each sphere rolling
on, filled with love for its sister sphere, guided and controlled
each by the other, yet always apart. Owen walked thinking how,
billions of years hence, all those lights might wax into one light,
all souls to one soul, all ends to one end. For one moment he Height
possess Evelyn's soul as he had never been able to possess it on
earth... perhaps.

"I love you now just as much as I loved you before, perhaps more, for
there is memory to aid me."

"You are in love with memory, not with me."

Her words went to his heart, as the thorn of the rose is said to go
to the nightingale's heart, and, unable to answer her, he listened.
"How wonderfully the bird sings, the interpreter of the primal
melancholy from which we never escape... since the beginning of time,
its interpreter."

"Is he telling his own story, or is he telling ours?"

"Both, for all love songs are as ours, made of the same intense
passionate melancholy. Why is love the most melancholy of all joys?
With what passionate melancholy he enchants her who is sitting in the
nest close by! The origin of art is sex; woman is a reed, and our
desire--"

"Hush! Listen to the nightingale! His discourse is better than
yours."

"How absorbed he is in his song, stave after stave; he seems to say,
'You want more tunes? If that is all, you shall have more.' Hush!" And
they listened to the rich warble, sounding so strange in the midst of
the lonely country. "A love-call of three notes, which he repeats
before passing into cadenzas. Hush!" The bird started again, and this
time as if encouraged by the success of his last efforts.

"What flutings! What trills! What runs! Pearls and jewels scattered.
Little tunes of three or four notes, casting a spell about the
hillside, followed by passionate cadenzas."

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