"Are we going up or down the river?" asked Joyce.
Charles looked wildly round: the bows of the punt seemed if anything to be pointing down stream.
"Down," he said.
The punt thought not: it yawed in a slow half circle and directed itself up-stream.
"That is down-stream, isn't it?" said he ... and they slowly slid into the bank.
A swift circular motion began, and a fool-hardy swan coming within range narrowly escaped decapitation. Then Lady Crowborough, having made her visit, appeared at the edge of the lawn, and Charles rashly promised to pick her up.... But they moved westward instead into the crimson pools of reflected sunset. Joyce had never ached so much in all her healthy life.
Yet even these inanities brought them nearer.... Love has a use for laughter.
Six months ago on an evening of gale and autumn storm, when the chimneys smoked and the rain made fierce tattoo on the streaming window panes, Joyce had gone up to her bedroom leaving her father and another guest together, and had felt some wild primæval instinct stirring in her blood, that made her long to go out alone into the blackness and hurly-burly of the streaming heavens, to be herself, solitary and unencumbered by the presence and subtle silent influence of others. And to-night, when she and Lady Crowborough left Philip and Charles talking together—Philip's cold had miraculously almost, encouraged by eucalyptus, vanished altogether—she again felt herself prey to the same desire. But to-night, it was no pall of streaming blackness that drew her, but the still starry twilight, and the warm scents of spring. But now, even as then, she wanted to be alone, hidden and unsuspected in the deep dusk of the star-shine, to wander through the fresh-fallen dew in the meadows, to finger the new leaves on riverside willows, to lie, perhaps face downwards in the growing hay-fields, to listen to the mysterious noises of the night, to learn—to learn what? She did not know, or at any rate did not formulate the answer, but it was something that the dark and the spring-time were ready to tell her: something that concerned the Spirit of life that kept the world spinning on its secular journey, and made bright the eyes of the wild creatures of the wood, and set the rose a-budding, and made in her the red blood leap on its joyous errands.... Surely, somehow, in the dark of the spring night she could link the pulse that beat in her with the great indwelling rhythm of the world, make herself realise that all was one, she and the singing-bird whose time was come, and the rose that tingled on its stem with the potential blossoms.
She had taken off her dinner-dress and put on a dressing gown, and now, blowing out her light, she went across to her open window, drew up the blind and leaned out into the night. And then in a flash of newly-awakened knowledge, she was aware that she wanted to be alone no longer. She wanted a teacher who also would learn with her, one more human than the star-light, and dearer to her heart than the fragrant hay-fields. But leaning out into the dark, she was nearer him than in the house, and she opened her heart ... it stood wide.