The absinthe and Diaz had conjured a spirit in me which was at once
feverish and calm. I was reading at sight difficult music full of
modulations and of colour, and I was reading it with calm assurance of
heart and brain. Deeper down the fever raged, but so separately that I
might have had two individualities. Enchanted as I was by the rich and
complex concourse of melodies which ascended from the piano and swam
about our heads, this fluctuating tempest of sound was after all only a
background for the emotions to which it gave birth in me. Naturally they
were the emotions of love--the sense of the splendour of love, the
headlong passion of love, the transcendent carelessness of love, the
finality of love. I saw in love the sole and sacred purpose of the
universe, and my heart whispered, with a new import: 'Where love is,
there is God also.'

The fever of the music increased, and with it my fever. We seemed to be
approaching some mighty climax. I thought I might faint with ecstasy,
but I held on, and the climax arrived--a climax which touched the
limits of expression in expressing all that two souls could feel in
coming together.

'Tristan has come into the garden,' I muttered.

And Diaz, turning his face towards me, nodded.

We plunged forward into the love-scene itself--the scene in which the
miracle of love is solemnized and celebrated. I thought that of all
miracles, the miracle which had occurred that night, and was even then
occurring, might be counted among the most wondrous. What occult forces,
what secret influences of soul on soul, what courage on his part, what
sublime immodesty and unworldliness on mine had brought it about! In