They were sitting in the garden. It was night. Very few people were out, for a great Austrian pianist was playing in the public drawing-room, and the little world of Luxor sat at his feet relentlessly. They two could hear, mingling with a Polonaise of Chopin, the throbbing of tom-toms in the dusty village, the faint and suggestive cry of the pipes, which fill the soul at the same time with desire, and regret for past desire killed by gratification. Bellairs had been making love to Clarice, and she had told him that she loved him. And he had kissed her and his kiss had been returned. "Will this kiss, too, have its echo?" he thought; and his eyes travelled towards the lighted windows of the drawing-room behind which Lady Betty sat. He turned again to Clarice. "Do you believe in echoes?" he asked. "Echoes!" "That each thing we do in life, each word, each cry, each act, calls into being, perhaps very soon, perhaps very late, a repetition?" "From the same person?" "Or from some other person." "What a curious idea. You think we cannot ever do anything without finding an imitator! I don't like to imagine it. I don't fancy that there can ever, in the history of the world, be an exact repetition of our feeling, our doing, to-night." "Yet, there may be. Who knows?" "I do. Instinct tells me there never can. There has never been, never will be, any woman with a heart just like mine, given to a man just in the same way as mine is given to you. Why should you think such a hateful thing?" "I don't know. It was only an idea that occurred to me." And again he glanced towards the lighted windows. "The world is very full of echoes," he went on; "our troubles are repeated." "But not our joys, our deepest joys. No, no, never!" "There have always been lovers, and they all act in much the same way!" "Hateful! Ah! why can't we invent some new mode of expression for ourselves--you and I?" "Because we are human beings, and one network of tangled limitations." "You make me cry with anger," she said. And when he looked, he saw that there were tears shining in her eyes. At that moment a ghastly sensation of compunction swept over him. What had he done? A deep wrong, the deepest wrong man can do. He had made an experiment, as a scientist may make an experiment. He had vivisected a soul, but the soul was yet ignorant of the fact. When it knew, would it die? But then he told himself he had to do it. For he loved passionately, and was certain that he could only gain the heart he had not yet completely won by gaining this heart that he had completely won. He had made an experiment. If it failed! But it could not fail. All that Clarice said, all that she thought, all that she desired, Betty said, thought, desired. After the necessary interval the echo must follow the voice. And he smiled to himself. "Why do you smile like that?" Clarice asked.