A short harsh call outside startled her, and she raised herself on her elbow to listen. The call was repeated; and then there stole on the May night a series of long liquid notes. A nightingale had begun to sing in the thorn hedge. The sound ceased, and the notes seemed to take flight and diminish and die away. She waited. Again came the low liquid call, and broke into trills that increased in volume. Another long pause left the air trembling; and then, as if by the giving way of some barrier, the full flood of song gushed like a torrent from the bird’s throat. The piercing melody filled the night; it mounted and hovered and rang under the low clouds, as if under rafters; it spread to the woods and out over the headland; and Jessie’s heart lifted, and her lips shaped the name of Willie Ramsey. To poets the nightingale might sing of unattainable things; to Jessie it sang only of Willie--Willie had all. The torrent of melody filled the dark loft where she lay with memories and images only of Willie; and she closed her eyes in bliss as the bird sang ever louder and clearer. What the beginning had been she could hardly have told. They had sought the nuts and blackberries together, and watched the trout in the shallow brook, and popped the bags of the foxgloves. They had played and kissed and wrangled; and he, too, with the other lads, had twisted the stalks of the pulling-grass into her hair, and pointed at her for her outbursts of passion.... Perhaps her hair had been the beginning. Once the children had plaited chaplets of green leaves for their hair, and on hers Willie had set the leaves of the copper beech, and laughed that hair and leaves should be of one colour. Long after, she had set her hair in a coil above her white nape; and when someone had again made sport of this, in place of the fit of temper had come quick tears.... The memories came faster as the bird sang ecstatically--of the season when their companionship had seemed, like Willie’s calf-voice, all broken and here and there; of the day when she had fashioned the straw mell-doll for the corner of the last stack, and the farm men had laughed, and jested at her “babe,” and Willie had seen her miserable flush ... and then of the evening in the milking-shed when he had so kissed her that it had seemed wonderful they could ever have kissed before as boy and girl. In spite of her passionateness, then, he had loved her.... From the yard came the sound of a horse’s stamping, and the dragging of the chain and the munching at the crib; she heard it even through the song. A faint light glimmered in the vent-hole--the moon had broken for a moment through the soft clouds, and the nightingale sang as though the hand of a man had seized him and were crushing the heart within him....