'I can hardly tell the one from the other,' he replied simply. 'The sea
seems to be poured out of the 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