slowly and as silently as I could towards him, I fitted the music to the
words of the second verse:--

Is she kind as she is fair?
For beauty lives with kindness.

Only a man in love, I thought, could be whistling that air with such
attention and accuracy. He hit that unusual interval--is it an augmented
seventh?--with a delicacy that was quite thrilling.

He had the world to himself, as yet. The birds of the morning had not
begun their orisons, while the birds of the night, the owls and the
corncrakes had, happily, retired before the promise of that weakening
darkness which seemed nevertheless to have reached a moment of
suspense--indeed, I fancied that it was darker, now, than when I had come
out of the Hall a quarter of an hour before.

The whistler had stopped before I reached the crest of the hill, and after
trying vainly to locate his whereabouts in the gloom, I leaned up against
one of the outermost trunks of the perky little clump of trees, and facing
East awaited developments. A thin, cold wind had sprung up, and was
quietly stirring the leaves above me to an uneasy sibilance. I heard, now,
too, an occasional sleepy twitter as if a few members of the orchestra had
come into their places and were indolently testing the tune of their
pipes. It came into my mind that the cold stir of air was the spirit of
the dying night, fleeing westward before the sun. Also, I found myself
wondering what would be the effect on us all if one morning we waited in
vain for the sunrise? I tried to picture my own emotions as the truth was
slowly borne in upon me that some unprecedented calamity had silently and
without any premonition befallen the whole world of men. Would one crouch