had been so wondrously happy. The world had been filled with a new magic, a wonderful, stately beauty which he had perceived for the first time. For long hours he had been wandering in another—a glamorous, primordial world.
“I suppose,” he said to himself, “I have lived too intensely. I seem to have had the stars and moon and everything else for guests, and now they’ve gone my house is weak.”
So he struggled to diagnose his case of splendour and sickness. He reviewed his hour of passion with Helena.
“Surely,” he told himself, “I have drunk life too hot, and it has hurt my cup. My soul seems to leak out—I am half here, half gone away. That’s why I understand the trees and the night so painfully.”
Then he came to the hour of Helena’s strange ecstasy over him. That, somehow, had filled him with passionate grief. It was happiness concentrated one drop too keen, so that what should have been vivid wine was like a pure poison scathing him. But his consciousness, which had been unnaturally active, now was dulling. He felt the blood flowing vigorously along the limbs again, and stilling his brain, sweeping away his sickness, soothing him.
“I suppose,” he said to himself for the last time, “I suppose living too intensely kills you, more or less.”
Then Siegmund forgot. He opened his eyes and saw the night about him. The moon had escaped from the cloud-pack, and was radiant behind a fine veil which glistened to her rays, and which was broidered with a lustrous halo, very large indeed, the largest halo Siegmund had ever seen. When the little lane
