bordered by tawny tea-roses, and out of
the globed melons they would scent the garnered warmth of the day
floating forth to mingle with the sweet breath of eve. Now was the hour
to climb the small hill behind the peach trees. Here across the mighty
valley of the Saone they could see a hundred miles away the Alps riding
across the horizon, light as clouds. And on the other side over their
own little house lay Chatillon cherry-bright in the sunset, then
damson-dark for a while, until it turned to a velvet gloom pricked with
points of gold and slashed with orange stains.

Michael and Stella always went to bed when the landscape had faded out.
But often Michael would sit for a long time and pore upon the rustling,
the dark, the moth-haunted night; or if the moon were up he would in
fancies swim out upon her buoyant watery sheen.

Sometimes, as he sat among the peach trees, a thought of Lily would come
to him; and he would imagine her form swinging round the corner. The
leaves and sunlight, while he dreamed of her, dappled the unread pages
of his book. He would picture himself with Lily on these sunny uplands
of the Lyonnais, and gradually she lost her urban actuality; gradually
the disillusionment of her behaviour was forgotten. With the
obliteration of Lily's failure the anguish for her bodily form faded
out, and Michael began to mould her to an incorporeal idea of first
love. In this clear air she stood before him recreated, as if the
purifying sun, which was burning him to the likeness of the earth
around, had been able at the same time to burn that idea of young love
to a slim Etruscan shape which could thrill him for ever with its
beauty, but nevermore fret him with the urgency of desire. He was glad
he had not spoken to her again after that garden interlude; and though
his heart would have leapt to see her motionable and swaying to his
glances as she came delicately towards him through the peach trees,
Michael felt that somehow he would not kiss her, but that he would
rather lead her gravely to the hill-top and set her near him to stay for
ever still, for ever young, for ever fair.

So all through that summer the sun burned Michael, while day by day the
white unhurried oxen moved, slow as clouds, up the hill towards the
town. But Michael never followed their shambling steps, and therefore he
never destroyed his dream of Chatillon.

As the time drew nearer and nearer for Stella's concert, she practised
more incessa