moon, and rocking in the hands of the coast. They are all one, just as your eyes and hands and what you say, are all you.”
“Yes,” she answered, thrilled. This was the Siegmund of her dream, and she had created him. Yet there was a quiver of pain. He was beyond her now, and did not need her.
“I feel at home here,” he said; “as if I had come home where I was bred.”
She pressed his hand hard, clinging to him.
“We go an awful long way round, Helena,” he said, “just to find we’re all right.” He laughed pleasantly. “I have thought myself such an outcast! How can one be outcast in one’s own night, and the moon always naked to us, and the sky half her time in rags? What do we want?”
Helena did not know. Nor did she know what he meant. But she felt something of the harmony.
“Whatever I have or haven’t from now,” he continued, “the darkness is a sort of mother, and the moon a sister, and the stars children, and sometimes the sea is a brother: and there’s a family in one house, you see.”
“And I, Siegmund?” she said softly, taking him in all seriousness. She looked up at him piteously. He saw the silver of tears among the moonlit ivory of her face. His heart tightened with tenderness, and he laughed, then bent to kiss her.
“The key of the castle,” he said. He put his face against hers, and felt on his cheek the smart of her tears.
“It’s all very grandiose,” he said comfortably, “but it does for to-night, all this that I say.”
“It is true for ever,” she declared.
