'I am her child, too,' he dreamed, as a child murmurs unconscious in
sleep. He had never felt her eyes so much as now, in the darkness, when
he looked only into deep shadow. She had never before so entered and
gathered his plaintive masculine soul to the bosom of her nurture.

'Come,' she said gently, when she knew he was restored. 'Shall we go?'

He rose, with difficulty gathering his strength.



_Chapter 12_


Siegmund made a great effort to keep the control of his body. The
hill-side, the gorse, when he stood up, seemed to have fallen back into
shadowed vagueness about him. They were meaningless dark heaps at some
distance, very great, it seemed.

'I can't get hold of them,' he said distractedly to himself. He felt
detached from the earth, from all the near, concrete, beloved things; as
if these had melted away from him, and left him, sick and unsupported,
somewhere alone on the edge of an enormous space. He wanted to lie down
again, to relieve himself of the sickening effort of supporting and
controlling his body. If he could lie down again perfectly still he need
not struggle to animate the cumbersome matter of his body, and then he
would not feel thus sick and outside himself.

But Helena was speaking to him, telling him they would see the