of a hot hearth as they toiled along the deep road. A few poppies here
and there among the wild rye floated scarlet in sunshine like
blood-drops on green water. Helena recalled Francis Thompson's poems,
which Siegmund had never read. She repeated what she knew, and laughed,
thinking what an ineffectual pale shadow of a person Thompson must have
been. She looked at Siegmund, walking in large easiness beside her.

'Artists are supremely unfortunate persons,' she announced.

'Think of Wagner,' said Siegmund, lifting his face to the hot bright
heaven, and drinking the heat with his blinded face. All states seemed
meagre, save his own. He recalled people who had loved, and he pitied
them--dimly, drowsily, without pain.

They came to a place where they might gain access to the shore by a path
down a landslip. As they descended through the rockery, yellow with
ragwort, they felt themselves dip into the inert, hot air of the bay.
The living atmosphere of the uplands was left overhead. Among the rocks
of the sand, white as if smelted, the heat glowed and quivered. Helena
sat down and took off her shoes. She walked on the hot, glistening sand
till her feet were delightfully, almost intoxicatingly scorched. Then
she ran into the water to cool them. Siegmund and she paddled in the
light water, pensively watching the haste of the ripples, like crystal
beetles, running over the white outline of their feet; looking out on
the sea that rose so near to them, dwarfing them by its far reach.

For a short time they flitted silently in the water's edge. Then there
settled down on them a twilight of sleep, the little hush that closes
the doors and draws the blinds of the house after a festival. They
wandered out across the beach above high-water mark, where they sat down