"
When they had completed once more the round of the garden, 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.
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