“It has gone,” she said flatly. “Gone! What shall I do if I am seduced and deserted by my experience that I loved, Ambrose?” “Do you consider,” he asked, “that you have had the experience of God?” “Do women have the experience of God unless they are in love?” She laughed a little, twisting her fingers among the reeds. “God? It is not a word that means anything. I only had an experience. I don’t know how to describe it, unless you have had it yourself. I had come to see the world, men and trees and mountains, as a varying manifestation of the same substance. I saw that everything was continuous, and the pine and pheasant on the branch were only another form of me. Me, did I say? There was no longer any me. Something else was there, and it gave me joy. It was more wonderful and satisfying than anything I had ever supposed could happen. I felt myself a piece of the universe, no longer in opposition to it, an unhappy little piece of separation. The infinite and inevitable had taken the place of my soul, and now it has left me, and however shall I get it back?” “Calling this experience, for convenience, the experience of God,” he replied, “one can only reply that God is not to be thought of as a common seducer. Believe me, before long the satisfaction you speak of will again fill your heart. Why, there is no cause for despair. This reaction was to be foreseen!” Her slender body was enshrined within the radiance of the rising sun in a frame of burning willows; her hair was an aureole of gossamer; but the heart in the midst of her was black. “I cannot feel hope!” she exclaimed. “I think God will forget me. He must have so many friends.” “A thing not really worth saying,” he replied. “You are angry with me.” She lifted her face to study him. “You are almost not impersonal.” There was a silence. She would not sit down beside him. It seemed she must say something that desired to be said with the advantage that standing gave her. Or was she about to take flight before it could say itself? There is a disguised desire in her, was his thought—some powerful desire that she does not recognize, yet, for what it is. “You cannot comfort me,” she told him. “My coldness of heart, that made me laugh, has left me, and I am weak enough to be crying for the Valley and the Pavilion, and all those summer days and the deep nights, and—and Yuan. Ambrose—Ambrose—” She seemed on the point of vanishing, but she spoke on: “You are a man of whom I can ask this—the only one. You are calm, passive. You will not mind. You see, your memory is so marvellous, you will never forget one hour of all the weeks we spent there or one thing that was ever said. And you have seen my soul stripped naked, so that it is wrong I should ever be the bride of another man. I desire you to marry me, so that I can always be near you and look in your mind and be reminded of the Valley, and always possess the days we spent there. Will you, Ambrose?” She blushed very furiously.