why he
loved her; and she would describe what she had felt at this time or at
that time, and together they would interpret her feeling. So beautiful
was the sound of their voices that by degrees they scarcely listened
to the words they framed. Long silences came between their words,
which were no longer silences of struggle and confusion but refreshing
silences, in which trivial thoughts moved easily. They began to speak
naturally of ordinary things, of the flowers and the trees, how they
grew there so red, like garden flowers at home, and there bent and
crooked like the arm of a twisted old man.

Very gently and quietly, almost as if it were the blood singing in her
veins, or the water of the stream running over stones, Rachel became
conscious of a new feeling within her. She wondered for a moment what it
was, and then said to herself, with a little surprise at recognising in
her own person so famous a thing:

"This is happiness, I suppose." And aloud to Terence she spoke, "This is
happiness."

On the heels of her words he answered, "This is happiness," upon which
they guessed that the feeling had sprung in both of them the same time.
They began therefore to describe how this felt and that felt, how like
it was and yet how different; for they were very different.

Voices crying behind them never reached through the waters in which
they were now sunk. The repetition of Hewet's name in short, dissevered
syllables was to them the crack of a dry branch or the laughter of a
bird. The grasses and breezes sounding and murmuring all round them,
they never noticed that the swishing of the grasses grew louder and
louder, and did not cease with the lapse of the breeze. A hand dropped
abrupt as iron on Rachel's shoulder; it might have been a bolt from
heaven. She fell beneath it, and the grass whipped across her eyes and
filled her mouth and ears. Through the waving stems she saw a figure,
large and shapeless against the sky. Helen was upon her. Rolled this
way and that, now seeing only forests of green, and now the high blue
heaven; she was speechless and almost without sense. At last she lay
still, all the grasses shaken round her and before her by her panting.
Over her loomed two great heads, the heads of a man and woman, of
Terence and Helen.

Both were flushed, both laughing, and the lips were moving; they came
together and kissed in the air above her. Broken fragments of speech
came down to her on the ground. She thoug