but if she looked too long they disappeared from her eyes.  She remembered nothing of what they had said, only that the colour of the evening was pale blue, with a little east wind in it, and that was yesterday!  They had talked and walked, and been tremulously interested in each other; but she remembered nothing that had been said until they turned to go home.  Then arose an exact vision of herself and Ulick walking under the graceful trees which overhung the Piccadilly railings.  There the park had been shaped into little dells, and it had reminded her of the picture in the Dulwich Gallery.  There his pleading was more passionate.  He had begged her to go away with him, and she had had to answer that she could not give Owen up.  She had felt that it was better to speak frankly, though she was sorry to have to say things that would give him pain.  She had told him the truth, and was glad she had done so, but she liked him very much, and had said it was a pity they had not met earlier.  “I missed you by about a year,” he answered.  His words came back to her, and she wondered if there was a cause for the accident, and if it could have been predicted.  They had walked slowly up the pathways, and seeing the young summer in the sky and trees, they had walked as upon air, borne up by the sadness of finding themselves divided.  They had thought of what forms and colours their lives would have taken if she had waited a few months, if she had not gone away with Owen; or, better still, if she had never met Owen.  She was conscious that such thoughts amounted to an infidelity, and she knew that she did love Ulick as she loved Owen.  But the temptation was cruelly intense, and she could not wrench herself out of its grip.  Their voices had fallen, they suffocated in the silence.  Ulick had mentioned Blake’s name, and she had accepted an artistic discussion as an escapement, but their hearts were overloaded, and it was in answer to his own thoughts that Ulick had spoken of the eighteenth-century mystic.  For the question had arisen in him whether the passions of the flesh are not destructive of spiritual exaltation, and he told her that exaltation was the gospel according to Blake.  We must seek to exalt ourselves, to live in the idea; sexual passion was a merely inferior state, but mean content was the true degradation.

“Then passion is the highest plane to which the materialist can rise?” asked Evelyn, thinking of Owen.

“Yes; I don’t think I’m wrong in admitting that, in the main, that is Blake’s contention.”

But at this point he had broken off his discourse, and told an anecdote in his half-witty, half-wistful way about an article which he had written on Blake and which had somehow strayed into the hands of a man and his wife living in Normandy.  This couple were at the time engaged in continuing the tradition of Bastien Lepage.  They laboriously copied what they saw in the fields—­grey days, hobnailed boots and the rest of it.  His article had, however,