Night was near and the darkness soon inclosed it; the beat of the oars sounding faintly through the silence of the evening.
There was little need to exact the promise from her.
Like Persephone she had eaten of the fatal pomegranate-seed, which, whether she would or no, would make her leave the innocence of youth, and the light of the sun and the blossoms of the glad green springtime world, and draw her footsteps backward and downward to that hell which none,—once having entered it,—can ever more forsake.
She drifted away from him into the shadows of evening as they died from the shore and the stream into the gloom of the night.
He thought no more of pursuing her than he thought of chasing the melted shadows.
Returning to his chamber he looked for some minutes at the panel where it leaned against the wall, catching the first pallid moon-gleam of the night.
"If she should not come, it will be of little moment," he thought. "I have nearly enough for remembrance there."
And he went away from the painting, and took up charcoal and turned to those anatomical studies whose severity he never spared himself, and for whose perfection he pursued the science of form even in the bodies of the dead.
From the moment that his hand touched the stylus he forgot her; for she was no more to him than a chance bird that he might have taken from its home among the ripe red autumn foliage and caged for awhile to study its grace and color, its longing eye and drooping wing; and then tossed up into the air again when he had done with it to find its way to freedom, or to fall into the fowler's snare;—what matter which?
The boat went on into the darkness under the willow banks, past the great Calvary, whose lantern was just lit and glimmered through the gloom.