There are great sunsets at Peshawar, flaming over the plain,
dying in melancholy splendour over the dangerous hills. They too
were hers, in a sense in which they could never be mine. But what
a companion! To my astonishment a wild thought of marriage
flashed across me, to be instantly rebuffed with a shrug.
Marriage - that one's wife might talk poetry to one about the
East! Absurd! But what was it these people felt and I could not
feel? Almost, shut up in the prison of self, I knew what Vanna
had felt in her village - a maddening desire to escape, to be a
part of the loveliness that lay beyond me. So might a man love a
king's daughter in her hopeless heights.

"It may be very beautiful on the surface," I said morosely; "but
there's a lot of misery below - hateful, they tell me."

"Of course. We shall get to work one day. But look at the sunset.
It opens like a mysterious flower. I must take Winifred home
now."

"One moment," I pleaded; "I can only see it through your eyes. I
feel it while you speak, and then the good minute goes."

She laughed.

"And so must I. Come, Winifred. Look, there's an owl; not like
the owls in the summer dark in England-

"Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping, Wavy in the
dark, lit by one low star."