“If she has run away from me,” he thought, “and just gone back to Chequers Street, there’s no doubt she’ll come out with me again. She certainly seemed at ease with me.” Thus spoke one voice within him. Another voice said: “She thinks you’re the father of all fools. You’ll never have the gall to ask her to go out with you again.” And then as he extinguished his third cigarette against a piece of chalk, moving aside the tiny green buds of an infinitesimal spray of milkwort, he became aware that a blackbird, in the dark twilight of hazel-stems, was uttering notes of an extraordinary purity and poignance.

He listened, fascinated. That particular intonation of the blackbird’s note, more full of the spirits of air and of water than any sound upon earth, had always possessed a mysterious attraction for him. It seemed to hold, in the sphere of sound, what amber-paved pools surrounded by hart’s-tongue ferns contain in the sphere of substance. It seemed to embrace in it all the sadness that it is possible to experience without crossing the subtle line into the region where sadness becomes misery.