nd-white-fringed canopy leaned toward each other.

"Tell me of your strange, foreign land! Have you roses
there--roses--roses? And nightingales that sing out your heart under
the moon?"

"I will tell you of the heather, the lark, and the mavis."

She listened. "Oh, it does not taste as tastes this lake! Give me
pain! Tell me of women you have loved.... Oh, hear! The nightingales
stop singing."

"Do you ever listen to the silence?"

"Of course ... when a friend dies--or I go to Mass--and sometimes when
I am singing very passionately. But this lake--"

She began to sing. The contralto throbbed, painted, told, brought
delight and melancholy. He sat with his hand loosened from hers, his
eyes upon the lake's blue-green depths. At last she stopped.

"Oh--h!... Let us go back to the talking shore and the chattering
villa! Somebody else is singing--somebody or something! I hear
silence--I hear it in the silence.... Some things I can sing against,
and some things I can't."

They went underneath the wall of roses. Her arm, sleeved as with mist,
touched his; her low, wide brow and great liquid eyes were at his
shoulder, at his breast. "O foreigner--and yet not at all foreign!
Tell me your English words for roses--walls of roses--and music that
never ceases in the night--and pleasing, pleasing, pleasing love!"

The boat came to the water steps. The two left it, climbing between
flowers. Down to them came a wave of laughter and hand-clapping.

"Celestina recites--but I do not think she does it so well!... That
is my window--see, where the roses mount!"

The company, flowing forth, caught them upon the terrace. "Lo, the
truants!"

But that night, instead of climbing where the roses climbed, he took a
boat from the number moored by the steps and rowed himself across the
lake to a piece of shore, bare of houses, lifting by steep slope and
crag into the mountain masses. He fastened the boat and climbed here.
The moon was round, the night merely a paler day. He went up among low
trees and bushes until he came to naked rock. He climbed here as far
as he might, found some manner of platform, and threw himself down,
below him the lake, around him the mountains.

He lay still until the expended energy was replaced. At last the mind
moved and, apprentice-bound to feeling, began again a hot and heavy
and bitter work, laid aside at times and then renewed. It was upon the
vindication to himself of Ian Rullock.

It was made to w