But the listener had no sooner lost the first joy over the insurrection of melody, begun to consider--whilst waiting breathless for its return--who she might be, what she was doing now, whether a lover was walking beside her, when she sang again, higher up the road. The first note rose up to the highest stars, clear and fresh and having a power like light over the gloom. Other notes hovered after it at the same height, and then with one swoop as of an eagle fell to the earth and silence before even a verse was finished. A low laugh drawn out very long an instant afterwards confirmed the first impression of the singer’s ease and joyousness. The man could see her neck lifted eagerly and her eyes flashing towards the lover or towards the stars, her lips parted, her breast heaving with deep draughts of the night and passion, her feet pacing with languid strength. He himself stood still as any tree in the ebb of the wind. Oh, for a horse to ride furiously, for a ship to sail, for the wings of an eagle, for the lance of a warrior or a standard streaming to conquest, for a man’s strength to dare and endure, for a woman’s beauty to surrender, for a singer’s fountain of precious tones, for a poet’s pen! He trembled and listened. The silence was unbroken; not a footstep or whisper was to be extracted from it by his eager and praying ear. He shivered in the cold. The last dead leaves shook upon the beeches, but the silence out there in that world still remained. She was walking or she was in her lover’s arms, for aught he knew. No sound came up to him where he stood eager and forlorn until he knew that she must be gone away for ever, like his lyric desires, and he went into his house and it was dark and still and inconceivably empty. As I turned into the inn and left him he was inclined either to put down that evening half to happiness and half to melancholy, or to cross out one or other of those headings as being in his case tautological.