Konrad, with a silent pressure, let go her hands and went back to the oars. She did not demur. The forbidden garden vanished, vanished utterly.
The dusk of early night now lay on the meadows. Not a sound was to be heard far or near. Yet the world seemed to echo with the melody of harp and the sound of song.
"And we've never seen your marble beauty," murmured Lilly, stroking his knees. "Yet I keep thinking that was her voice."
"And I, too," he burst out passionately. "She wasn't singing for those good people up there at all, but for us--for us alone."
"Ah! I wish I could sing it like her!"
"Try, at any rate."
She sang a few passages here and there. But she could not connect them, and, what was more, something else rose and forced its way imperiously into her memory.
With that grandest and most exquisite inspiration of the great master mingled, unbidden, her own poor "Song of Songs." And she sang out into the profound silence:
"Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon: for why should I be as one that turneth aside ..."
She paused.