She said once that she liked to touch me now and then to make sure that I was quite real and would not melt away.

I did not know then why she said it, but I understood afterward.
Sometimes we sat under the apple-tree until the long twilight deepened into shadow, which closed round us, and a nightingale that lived in the garden began to sing.

We all three loved the nightingale, and felt as though it knew that we were listening to it.

It is a wonderful thing to sit quite still listening to a bird singing in the dark, and to dare to feel that while it sings it knows how your soul adores it.

It is like a kind of worship.
We had been sitting listening for quite a long time, and the nightingale had just ceased and left the darkness an exquisite silence which fell suddenly but softly as the last note dropped, when Mrs.MacNairn began to talk for the first time of what she called The Fear.
I don't remember just how she began, and for a few minutes I did not quite understand what she meant.