n joy and
pain--joy to be sitting here, honoured with her confidences, though he
had none but a listener's share in them--here, in the still, scented
evening, caressed by her marvellous voice; and pain, not because her
talk charged life full of new meanings, every one of which he felt to
be vitally true and as certainly missed by his own starved experience,
but because it took him for granted as a kindly stranger, an outsider
admitted to these mysteries, and warned him that his time on this holy
ground was short; nay, that it was drawing swiftly to a close. And how
could he go back to the old monotony, the old routine?

He remembered that, to whatever he went back, it would not be to
these--at any rate, not for long. The future might hold degradation,
poverty of the sharpest, hard work for a pittance of daily bread; but
at least his dismissal would send him back to a life in which lay
somewhere these meanings that trembled like visions of light in the
heart of Vashti's talk. They gave him glimpses of the heaven which, by
their remembered rays, he must seek for himself. How many years had he
wasted--how many years!

They moored the boat close under the cliff's shadow, and, climbing the
rocks, between the cove and the East Porth, sat down to wait. Vashti
sat in reverie, plucking and smelling at small tufts of the thyme;
then, rousing herself with a happy laugh, she challenged the Commandant
to name her all the islets, rock by rock, lying out yonder in the
darkness. He tried, and she corrected omission after omission, mocking
him. What did he care? It was enough to be seated here, close with her
in the starry, odorous night.

Presently she tired of the contest, and clasping her knees began,
without warning given, to croon a little song--

"Over the rim of the moor,
And under a starry sky,
Two men came to my door
And rested them wearily.

Beneath the bough and the star
In a whispering foreign tongue,
They talked of a land afar,
And the merry days so young."

She sang it as though to herself, or as though answering the murmur of
the tide on the rocks at their feet; but at the third verse her voice
lifted:

"Beneath the dawn and the bough
I heard them arise and go--
But my heart, it is aching--aching now,
For the more it will never know."

The song died away in a low wistful minor, as though it breathed its
last upon a question. "The merry days--the me