The boat slipped out from the low archway into the open water. It was a pale and delicate night, one of those autumn nights that are full of a white mystery. A thin mist lay about the water, floated among the lower woods. Higher up, the mountains rose out of it. Their green sides looked black and soft in the starlight, their summits strangely remote and inaccessible. Through the mist, here and there, shone faintly the lights of the scattered villages. The bells in the water were still ringing languidly, and their voices emphasised the pervading silence, a silence full of the pensive melancholy of Nature in decline. Viola rowed slowly out towards the middle of the lake. Awe had come upon her. There seemed a mystical presence in the night, something far away but attentive, a mind concentrated upon the night, upon Nature, upon herself. She was very conscious of it, and it seemed to her not as if eyes, but as if a soul were watching her and everything about her; the stars and the mountains, the white mist, even the movement of the boat. This concentrated, mystical attention oppressed her. It was like a soft, impalpable weight laid upon her. She rowed faster. But now it seemed to her as if she were being followed. Casa Felice had already disappeared. The shore was hidden in the darkness. She could only see vaguely the mountain-tops. She paused, then dipped the oars again, but again--after two or three strokes--she had the sensation that she was being followed. She recalled Paolo’s action when they were returning to Casa Felice in the evening, leaned over the boat’s side and put her ear close to the water. When she did so she heard the plash of oars--rhythmical, steady, and surely very near. For a moment she listened. Then a sort of panic seized her. She remembered the incident of the evening, the hidden boat, Paolo’s assertion that it was waiting near the house, that it had not gone. He had said, too, that the unseen rower had begun to row when he began to sing, had stopped rowing when he stopped singing. A conviction came to her that this same rower as now following her. But why? Who was it? She knew nobody on the lake, except Robin. And he--no, it could not be Robin. The ash of the oars became more distinct. Her unreasoning fear increased. With the mystical attention of the great and hidden mind was now blent a crude human attention. She began to feel really terrified, and, seizing her oars, she pulled frantically towards the middle of the lake. “Viola!” Out of the darkness it came. “Viola!”