them in order with the gold plate, and lighting both the spirit-lamp and the lantern:  for here it was quite dark.  Near us behind the curtain of tendrils was a small green cave in the rock, and at its mouth a pool two yards wide, a black and limpid water that leisurely wheeled, discharging a little rivulet from the cave:  and in it I saw three owl-eyed fish, a finger long, loiter, and spur themselves, and gaze.  Leda, who cannot be still in tongue or limb, chattered in her glib baby manner as we ate, and then, after smoking a cigarette, said that she would go and ‘lun,’ and went, and left me darkling, for she is the sun and the moon and the host of the stars, I occupying myself that night in making a calendar at the end of this book in which I have written, for my almanack and many things that I prized were lost with the palace—­making a calendar, counting the days in my head—­but counting them across my thoughts of her.

She came again to tell me good-night, and then went down to the train to sleep; and I put out the lantern, and stooped within the cave, and made my simple couch beside the little rivulet, and slept.

But a fitful sleep, and soon again I woke; and a long time I lay so, gradually becoming conscious of a slow dripping at one spot in the cave:  for at a minute’s interval it darkly splashed, regularly, very deliberately; and it seemed to grow always louder and sadder, and the splash at first was ‘Leesha,’ but it became ‘Leda’ to my ears, and it sobbed her name, and I pitied myself, so sad was I. And when I could no longer bear the anguished melancholy of its spasm and its sobbing, I arose and went softly, softly, lest she should hear in that sounding silence of the hushed and darksome night, going more slow, more soft, as I went nearer, a sob in my throat, my feet leading me to her, till I touched the carriage.  And against it a long time I leant my clammy brow, a sob aching in my poor throat, and she all mixed up in my head with the suspended hushed night, and with the elfin things in the air that made the silence so musically a-sound to the vacant ear-drum, and with the dripping splash in the cave.  And softly I turned the door-handle, and heard her breathe in Asleep, her head near me; and I touched her hair with my lips, and close to her ear I said—­for I heard her breathe as if in sleep—­’Little Leda, I have come to you, for I could not help it, Leda:  and oh, my heart is full of the love of you, for you are mine, and I am yours:  and to live with you, till we die, and after we are dead to be near you still, Leda, with my broken heart near your heart, little Leda—­’

I must have sobbed, I think; for as I spoke close at her ears, with passionately dying eyes of love, I was startled by an irregularity in her breathing; and with cautious hurry I shut the door, and quite back to the cave I stole in haste.

And the next morning when we met I thought—­but am not now sure—­that she smiled singularly:  I thought so.  She may, she may, have heard—­But I cannot tell.