As soon as he reached the open country he stopped in order to contemplate the whole plain which was suffused with this caressing glow and basking serenely in the tender, languid charm of the night. The brief, metallic croak of frogs filled the air on which the notes of a distant nightingale fell one by one. Its clear and delicate song was made more for reverie than reflection and its music to accompany kisses in the magic of the moonlight. As the priest took up his walk again he felt something within him, he knew not what, begin to falter. He felt suddenly tired and weak. He needed to sit down and look, to admire the work of God.

In the distance a long line of poplars snaked along the winding river’s edge. A fine, vaporous white mist through which gleaming silver moonbeams shone hovered over and around the banks and enveloped in a transparent cocoon every twist and turn of the waters.

The priest stopped once more, touched to the depths of his soul as he felt growing within him a mounting and irresistible tenderness. He could feel a worrying doubt creep into his thoughts: a question was beginning to grow once more in his mind. Why had God created this? Since night was obviously made for sleep and unconsciousness, rest and all-embracing oblivion, why make it even more lovely than the day and sweeter than any twilight or dawn? Why did this slow and stately star, more beautiful than the sun itself, banish all shadow and illumine things too delicate and mysterious for the light of day? Why did the finest of nature’s songbirds not rest like her fellows but sing alone in the darkness of night? Why this veil cast over the world? Why the wild beating of his heart? This yearning of his soul? Why this languor of the body? Why this panoply of loveliness which no one sees if asleep in bed? For whom was this sublime spectacle created, this poetry beamed down from heaven to earth?

The priest could find no answer.

Suddenly in the distance at the meadow’s edge, under the arch of trees resplendent in the glistening haze, two shadowy figures walking side by side came into view. The man, the taller of the two, had his arm around the shoulders of his partner and from time to time, drawing her closer to him, he kissed her forehead. The couple gave life to this still landscape which surrounded them like some divine frame. They seemed as one, the single being for whom this calm and silent night was made. They came towards the priest as a living response sent to him by his Maker.