'I do not know,' he answered, like a man lost in a dream, 'I do not remember. What are you saying?'
She was silent. Then she rose to read the inscriptions written on the pillars of the little temple. They were, for the most part, written by lovers, by newly-married couples, by solitary dreamers. All expressed some sentiment of love, grave or gay; they sang the praises of a beauty or mourned a lost delight; they told of some burning kiss or ecstasy of languor; they thanked the ancient wooded glades that had sheltered their love, pointed out some secret nook to the happy visitor of the morrow, described the lingering charms of a sunset they had watched. All of them, whether lovers or married, under the fascination of the eternal feminine had been seized with lyric fervour in this little lonely Belvedere to which they ascended by a flight of steps carpeted with moss as thick as velvet. The very walls spoke. An indefinable melancholy emanated from these unknown voices of vanished lovers, a sadness that seemed almost sepulchral, as if they had been epitaphs in a chapel.
Suddenly Maria turned to Andrea. 'You have been here too,' she said.
'I do not know,' he answered again, looking at her in the same dreamy way as before, 'I do not remember. I remember nothing. I love you.'
She read, written in Andrea's hand, an epigram of Goethe's, a distich, the one beginning—Sage, wie lebst du? Say, how livest thou? Ich lebe! I live! 'And were it mine to live a hundred, hundred years, my only wish would be that to-morrow should be as to-day.' Underneath this there was a date: Die ultima februarii 1885, and a name: Helena Amyclæ.
'Let us go,' she said.
The canopy of branches cast deep shadows over the little moss-carpeted stairway.
'Will you take my arm?' he asked.
'No, thank you,' she replied.
They went on in silence. The heart of each was heavy.