“I knew it when I first saw you,” Clarice said. “Directly I looked at you that evening on the bank I knew it.”
“How strange,” Bellairs answered.
“And you—did you know it when you heard me playing?”
“That mazurka! Remember I am a man.”
They were sitting in the garden. It was night. Very few people were out, for a great Austrian pianist was playing in the public drawing-room, and the little world of Luxor sat at his feet relentlessly. They two could hear, mingling with a Polonaise of Chopin, the throbbing of tom-toms in the dusty village, the faint and suggestive cry of the pipes, which fill the soul at the same time with desire, and regret for past desire killed by gratification. Bellairs had been making love to Clarice, and she had told him that she loved him. And he had kissed her and his kiss had been returned.
“Will this kiss, too, have its echo?” he thought; and his eyes travelled towards the lighted windows of the drawing-room behind which Lady Betty sat. He turned again to Clarice.
“Do you believe in echoes?” he asked.
“Echoes!”
“That each thing we do in life, each word, each cry, each act, calls into being, perhaps very soon, perhaps very late, a repetition?”
“From the same person?”