On a dark blue May night they lay in two chairs covered with tarpaulins on the deck of the ship that was taking them to Genoa. An old Frenchman with clear eyes, who had sat opposite them at dinner, stood near them for a while and drew their attention to the stars that hung in the infinitude like heavy silver drops. He named some of them by name, politely and courteously, as though he felt it incumbent upon him to introduce to each other the shining wanderers of heaven and the young married couple. He then said good-night and went down into his cabin. But George thought of his lonely journey over the same route and under the same sky in the previous spring after his farewell from Grace. He had told Anna about her, not so much from any emotional necessity, as in order to free his past from that atmosphere of sinister mystery in which it often seemed to Anna to disappear, by the conjuring up into life of a specific shape and the designation of a specific name. Anna knew of Labinski's death, of George's conversation with Grace at Labinski's grave, of George's stay with her in Sicily. He had even shown her a picture of Grace; and yet he thought to himself with a slight shudder how little Anna herself knew of this very epoch of his life, which he had described to her with an almost reckless lack of reserve; and he felt how impossible it was to give any other person any idea of a period which that person had not actually lived through, and of the contents of so many days and nights every minute of which had been full of vivid life. He realised the comparative insignificance of the little lapses from truth of which he frequently allowed himself to be guilty in his narrative, compared with that ineradicable taint of falseness to which every memory gives birth on its short journey from the lips of one person to the ear of another. And if Anna herself at some later time wanted to describe to some friend, some new lover, as honestly as she possibly could, the time which she spent with George, what after all could that friend really learn? Not much more than a story such as he had read hundreds of times over in books: a story of a young creature who had loved a young man, had travelled about with him, had felt ecstasy and at times tedium, had felt herself at one with him, and yet had frequently felt lonely. And even if she should make an attempt to give a specific account of every minute ... there still remained an irrevocable past, and for him who has not lived through it himself the past can never be the truth. The stars glistened above him. Anna's head had sunk slowly upon his breast and he supported it gently with his hands. Only the slight ripple in the depths betrayed that the ship was sailing onward. But it still went on towards the morning, towards home, towards the future.