distinct, the
polar star at an angle--the star whereby Owen used to steer. All the
world seemed to be going to the same sweet strain, the soul,
seemingly freed, rose to the lips, and, in her pride, sought words
wherewith to tell the passionate melancholy of the night and of life.
But the soul could not tell it; only the nightingale, who, without
knowing it, was singing what the soul may only feel.

"The bird is telling me what your voice used to tell me long ago."

The lovers wandered through the garden, suffused with delicate
scents, and Owen told her of the legend of the nightingale and the
swallow, a legend coming down from some barbaric age, from a king
called Pandion, who, despite his wife's beauty, fell in love with her
sister, and ravished her in some town in Thessaly, the name of which
Owen could not remember. Fearing, however, that his lust would reach
his wife's ears, Pandion cut out the girl's tongue. This barbarous
act, committed before Greece was, had been redeemed by the Grecian
spirit, which had added that the girl; though without tongue to tell
the cruel deed, had, nevertheless, hands wherewith to weave it. The
weft of her misfortune only inspired another barbarous deed: Pandion
killed both sisters and his son Italus. Again the Grecian spirit
touched the legend, changing the tongueless girl into a swallow, a
bird with a little cry, and fleet wings to carry its cry all over the
world, and the unhappy wife into the bird "which sleeps all day and
sings all night." "Sophocles," Owen said, "speaks of the nightingale
as moaning all the night in ivy clusters, moaning or humming. A
strange expression his seems to us, our musical sense being different
from that of the antique world, if the antique world really possessed
any musical sense." The lovers wandered round the house, listening to
the bird's sweet singing, stopping at the hill's steep side so that
they might listen better.

"Now the bird is telling of sorrows other than ours--isn't that so,
Evelyn? I don't seem to recognise anything of ourselves in its song;
it is singing a new song."

"Perhaps," Evelyn answered, "now it is singing the sadness of the
mother under the hill for her son."

"I went to see her, she is not unhappy; she is happy that her son is
With you."

"But another child died last year; and for her, if she is listening,
the bird is certainly singing the death of that child."

When they had completed once more the round of the garde