“No, it was not a dream,” she said. “You came back. Thank God you came back, just to tell us that those who do not come back stand awakened in that ecstasy—in that ecstasy. And The Fear is nothing. It is only The Dream. The awakening is out on the hillside, out on the hillside! Listen!” She started as she said it. “Listen! The nightingale is beginning again.”
He sent forth in the dark a fountain—a rising, aspiring fountain—of golden notes which seemed to reach heaven itself. The night was made radiant by them. He flung them upward like a shower of stars into the sky. We sat and listened, almost holding our breath. Oh! the nightingale! the nightingale!
“He knows,” Hector MacNairn’s low voice said, “that it was not a dream.”
When there was silence again I heard him leave his chair very quietly.
“Good night! good night!” he said, and went away. I felt somehow that he had left us together for a purpose, but, oh, I did not even remotely dream what the purpose was! But soon she told me, almost in a whisper.
“We love you very much, Ysobel,” she said. “You know that?”
“I love you both, with all my heart,” I answered. “Indeed I love you.”
“We two have been more to each other than mere mother and son. We have been sufficient for each other. But he began to love you that first day when he watched you in the railway carriage. He says it was the far look in your eyes which drew him.”
“I began to love him, too,” I said. And I was not at all ashamed or shy in saying it.
“We three might have spent our lives together,” she went on. “It would have been a perfect thing. But—but—” She stood up as if she could not remain seated. Involuntarily I stood up with her. She was trembling, and she caught and held me in her arms. “He cannot stay, Ysobel,” she ended.