But the attentions of Josephine and Veronique had become too pressing; so he retired from the reading-room, and took refuge in his own room up-stairs.  It fronted the sea.  He could hear the long, monotonous, continuous wash of the waves:  from time to time the windows rattled with the wind.

He took from his portmanteau another volume from that he had been reading, and sat down by the window.  But he had only read a line or two when he turned and looked absently out on the sea.  Was he trying to recall, amidst all that confused and murmuring noise, some other sound that seemed to haunt him?

    “Who is your lady of love, oh ye that pass
     Singing?”

Was he trying to recall that pathetic thrill in his friend Evelyn’s voice which he knew was but the echo of another voice?  He had never heard Natalie Lind read:  but he knew that that was how she had read, when Evelyn’s sensitive nature had heard and been permeated by the strange tremor.  And now, as he opened the book again, whose voice was it he seemed to hear, in the silence of the small room, amidst the low and constant murmur of the waves?

“—­And ye shall die before your thrones be won. 
—­Yea, and the changed world and the liberal sun
Shall move and shine with out us, and we lie
Dead; but if she too move on earth and live—­
But if the old world, with all the old irons rent,
Laugh and give thanks, shall we be not content? 
Nay, we shall rather live, we shall not die,
Life being so little, and death so good to give.

* * * * * * *

“—­But ye that might be clothed with all things pleasant,
Ye are foolish that put off the fair soft present,
That clothe yourselves with the cold future air;
When mother and father, and tender sister and brother,
And the old live love that was shall be as ye,
Dust, and no fruit of loving life shall be. 
—­She shall be yet who is more than all these were,
Than sister or wife or father unto us or mother.”

He turned again to the window, to the driven yellow sea, and the gusts of rain.  Surely there was no voice to be heard from other and farther shores?

“—­Is this worth life, is this to win for wages? 
Lo, the dead mouths of the awful gray-grown ages,
The venerable, in the past that is their prison,
In the outer darkness, in the unopening grave,
Laugh, knowing how many as ye now say have said—­
How many, and all are fallen, are fallen and dead: 
Shall ye dead rise, and these dead have not risen? 
—­Not we but she, who is tender and swift to save.

“—­Are ye not weary, and faint not by the way,
Seeing night by night devoured of day by day,
Seeing hour by hour consumed in sleepless fire? 
Sleepless:  and ye too, when shall ye too sleep? 
—­We are weary in heart and head, in hands and feet,
And surely more than all things sleep were sweet,
Than all things save the inexorable desire
Which whoso knoweth shall neither faint nor weep.”