midnight
For though her years were twenty-seven she had not loved before . She had dreamed of love , had been in love with love and with being loved , had believed she loved ; but nothing in her experience compared with such rapture as to-night obsessed her being , wholly and without respite . Life , indeed , grants no compensation for the ignominious necessity of love but this , that no other love was ever real but to-day 's alone . And so the beauty of that moonlight midnight seemed supernal . Becalmed , the island lay steeped in floods of ethereal silver , its sky an iridescent dome , its sea a shimmering shield of opalescence , its lawns and terraces argentine shadowed with deepest violet . There was never a definite sound , only the sibilance of a stillness made of many interwoven sounds , soft lisp of wavelets on the sands a hundred feet below , hum of nocturnal insect life in thickets and plantations , sobbing of a tiny , vagrant breeze lost and homeless in that vast serenity , wailing of a far violin , rumour of distant motor-cars . A night of potent witchery , a woman willingly bewitched ... .