For a few moments, speech seemed impossible.

The darkness was so intense that although he was acutely conscious of her presence there, only a few feet away, nothing but the barest outline of her form was visible.

The silence which she had brought him to seek was all around them.

There was just the faintest splash of water from the spot where the stream and the river met, the distant barking of a dog, the occasional croaking of a frog from somewhere in the midst of the bed of lilies.

Otherwise the silence and the darkness were like a shroud.