“Do you ever listen to the silence?”

“Of course ... when a friend dies—­or I go to Mass—­and sometimes when I am singing very passionately.  But this lake—­”

She began to sing.  The contralto throbbed, painted, told, brought delight and melancholy.  He sat with his hand loosened from hers, his eyes upon the lake’s blue-green depths.  At last she stopped.

“Oh—­h!...  Let us go back to the talking shore and the chattering villa!  Somebody else is singing—­somebody or something!  I hear silence—­I hear it in the silence....  Some things I can sing against, and some things I can’t.”

They went underneath the wall of roses.  Her arm, sleeved as with mist, touched his; her low, wide brow and great liquid eyes were at his shoulder, at his breast.  “O foreigner—­and yet not at all foreign!  Tell me your English words for roses—­walls of roses—­and music that never ceases in the night—­and pleasing, pleasing, pleasing love!”

The boat came to the water steps.  The two left it, climbing between flowers.  Down to them came a wave of laughter and hand-clapping.

“Celestina recites—­but I do not think she does it so well!...  That is my window—­see, where the roses mount!”

The company, flowing forth, caught them upon the terrace.  “Lo, the truants!”

But that night, instead of climbing where the roses climbed, he took a boat from the number moored by the steps and rowed himself across the lake to a piece of shore, bare of houses, lifting by steep slope and crag into the mountain masses.  He fastened the boat and climbed here.  The moon was round, the night merely a paler day.  He went up among low trees and bushes until he came to naked rock.  He climbed here as far as he might, found some manner of platform, and threw himself down, below him the lake, around him the mountains.

He lay still until the expended energy was replaced.  At last the mind moved and, apprentice-bound to feeling, began again a hot and heavy and bitter work, laid aside at times and then renewed.  It was upon the vindication to himself of Ian Rullock.

It was made to work hard....  Its old task used to be to keep asleep upon the subject.  But now for a considerable time this had been its task.  Old feeling, old egoism, awakened up and down, drove it hard!  It had to make bricks without straw.  It had to fetch and carry from the ends of the earth.

Emotion, when it must rest, provided for it a dull place of listlessness and discontent.  But the taskmaster now would have it up at all hours, fashioning reasons and justifications.  The soonest found straw in the fields lay in the faults of others—­of the world in general and Alexander Jardine in particular.  Feeling got its anodyne in gloating over these.  It had the pounce of a panther for such a bitter berry, such a weed, such a shameful form.  It did not always gloat, but it always held up and said, Who could be weaker here—­more open to question? It made constant, sore comparison.