She allowed herself to be impelled by the pressure of his arm. Closely linked, they followed the tenebrous path by the wood, climbed skirting its dark edge. Her lover talked copiously and interestingly as he always did--on a multitude of subjects. He was humorous, satirical, rhapsodic, earnestly eloquent by turns. How like him it was! She admired the wide range of his mind. Much more easily than usual--she realised it in a little glow of self-flattery--she comprehended him all through a long and intricate disquisition. Yet lurking somewhere in her dream-consciousness was the feeling that there was an all-important topic on which he did not touch. A part of her tried to identify that topic and failed. The failure worried her. He talked of travel, of a trip into Germany through the Black Forest, across Lake Constance into Austria and the Tyrol. Of course! That was to be their honeymoon tour. In the days before--before what?--before something--they had often talked about it. They were not even officially engaged then--she remembered how they used to laugh together over these distant projects that were treated as imminent facts. They had even had a little quarrel over the choice of two alternative stopping places. She came back to his voice. "Listen!" he said. "Listen!" A nightingale was singing with supernatural power. Loud, thrillingly resonant under the stars that now powdered the sky, the song welled out to them. Its burden, mysteriously comprehended by them to esoteric depths, was sorrow--the sorrow of all the world, here completely expressed, transmuted into so strange a beauty that the listener held his breath. The deep sobs, shudderingly repeated, that threw off the magic runs of crystal sound, pervaded the atmosphere about them with a mystic spell, evoked an immense pity in them. They could have wept. Suddenly they were conscious of a perfidy in this magically induced compassion--a danger, common to both, implied in it, imminent. He flung his arms about her to protect her, shielding her from it. "You are mine, dearest!--mine!--only mine!" His words went ringing through the stars, passed out of hearing, but were not silenced. She felt kisses of intense fervour upon her mouth--responded. "I am!" she cried. Her words also rolled away endlessly, as though permuted into imperishable brass. "I am yours alone!" She half-woke in the feeling of a near presence, then sank again into a sleep that remembers not its dreams. * * * * *