"A staircase up to the room above."
"What a lovely place," she cried joyfully, trying to remind him of the existence of happiness, "to play in in the summer! Could one sleep up there, do you think?"
He switched off the light. "I daresay," he said gruffly in the darkness.
"And look!" She pointed to a moonlit niche in the middle of the wall high and deep enough to hold a life-sized statue. "It would be fun if I stood up there, wouldn't it?"
There was silence; and then amazingly, his voice cracked out on her like a whip. "Why do you say that? Did anybody tell you about this place? Has she told you anything about it?"
"Why, no!" she stammered. "Nobody's told me a thing of it! I just thought it would be fun if I were to stand up there like a statue. You take me up too quick."
His passion died suddenly. "No," he said weakly, exhaustedly. "Of course she wouldn't tell you. I was stupid. Yes, you're quite right. That's what a man would do with a woman, wouldn't he, if they were here together and they were lovers? He'd make her stand up there." Insanely he switched on the electric torch and flashed it up and down the niche, though in the dazzling moonlight its rays were but a small circular soilure.
"But it's not summer now," she reminded him tenderly, laying her hand on his sleeve. "Since she's not here, let's go home. Think of those bonny fires burning away and nobody the better for them!"
"That's what he'd do, he'd make her stand up there," he muttered, sending the light up and down the niche very slowly, as if in time to slow thoughts.
She turned and went down the steps and walked away, holding her hands, close to her eyes like blinkers, so that she might be the less afflicted by the night, whose beauty was a reproach to her. A desire to look out towards the sea and the flatlands came on her. This temple set among the woods was a human place; men had laid the stones, men had planted the trees, men had thought of it before it was. It was the stage for a scene in the human drama, which she had not been able to play. But the sea and the flatlands were not made by men; they made humanity seem a little thing, and human success and failure not reasonable causes for loud laughter or loud weeping. At the hill's edge she leaned against a tree and gazed down on the moon-diluted waters, on the moon-powdered lands, and was jealous of the plain, disturbing woman who kept herself covered with the quietness of the marshes to the distress of others; and saw suddenly, on the path at the foot of the slope, the far, weak ray of a dancing lantern.