n, 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
w