Then again he listened intently to the queer realities of spirit that she was creating with form and movement in the night. The plectrum that had made a thridding of crickets now made a whispering of the leaves of the bamboo. Next, solid and clear out of her vision, a sound like the patter of pearls raining on a temple of porcelain. With composure and quiet deliberation she made her lute sing the secret of life of the valley, strength of giant pine, depth and stillness of the lake, high wind among crags; in it dreamed the exaggerated shapes of Yuan, Hsiao and Wang Li. It was there in the grove she sang. Ambrose gazed, as one gazes with the mind into an experience striving to see what is there, as if he should see her at the heart of the grove in a transfiguration. But there obtruded upon his gaze, now used to the darkness, the figures of the seven Sages, listening in their chairs. Had Richard Frew-Gaff ears, he wondered, to hear her turn the stars and all physical reality into voices of ghosts? Did Blackwood receive some whisper of the truth Wang aimed at him? Quentin listened with limbs stretched out in a rigor of emotion. Terence he dimly perceived with hands wrung between his knees, frowning perhaps on some new, queer beauty. Sombrewater had bowed his head in his hand—understanding too fully that he had a strange lost girl for a daughter. Fulke and Ruby, no doubt, were making love among the trees, perhaps out on the starry Lake; perhaps they heard and were afraid. His mind returned to the lute-player in the grove. Now she was making a music that was icy and terrible. Image of pine, lake, and crag became faint and vanishing. There was nothing human in it, but only a loneliness of Himalayan peaks and a coldness of outer space. It was the vision of Yuan. The coldness descended even on the heart of Ambrose as he was floated near upon the edge of extinction. The starry sky, the lawn, the grove, the bright gilded bridge, swam, and there was nothing solid. Suddenly her plectrum tore the strings with a sound like the rending of silk. There was silence, and out of it there grew a divine laughter. 46 Ambrose gave a pull with his paddle and drove his canoe head-on into the grey and misty margin of an islet. He shivered, for the cold of daybreak was still on the water. He had meant to stop here, at the bend of the Lake, and look finally at the valley and the island, to reflect on the march of time, taste for a due moment an emotion nobler than sadness, as the beloved valley and the rich experience of the summer faded from bright now into dim past. But valley and rock had vanished in morning vapour. There was nothing but an islet glimpsed in a sepia mist, a blur of willow, a crag high overhead in the vapour, a dejected heron brooding on one leg in the shallows.