The castle seemed to stand by the side of some frozen sea, so intense
was the silence. He had always looked back upon this morning as one
of the great moments of his life, and going to her room like going to
some great religious rite. Each man must worship where he finds the
Godhead.
"Who knows," he said to Evelyn, "that the bird in the nest close by
does not listen with the same rapture--"
"As you, in the box, used to listen to me on the stage? For the
comparison to hold good, I should have sung Italian music, roulades.
Listen to those cadenzas!"
"How melancholy are their gaieties!"
"Yes, aren't they?" she answered. "How poignant the two notes!--with
which _il commence son grand air_."
"But our love-call ended years ago," she said, with an accent of
regret in her voice. And they walked towards the house, Owen dreading
that some sudden impulse might throw her into his arms and her mind
might be unhinged again, and he would lose her utterly. So he spoke
to her of the first; thing that came into her mind, and what came
first was a memory of Moschus's lament for Bion and the brevity of
human life as contrasted with the long life of the world.
"'The mallows wither in the garden, and the green parsley--' how does
it go?" And he tried to remember as they went upstairs.
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