“I don’t know. I know a deal of Morgen Fay and there’s a deal I do not know. But neither what I know nor what I do not know creeps and prays to a dead man’s bones. All that to me is a mockery! I laugh at it and against it. Some are healed? Doubtless! Many! But believed they so of it, a rose in my garden, so they smelled it, kissed it, believed it was rooted in Paradise, would heal them! They heal themselves. Believing! Believing! I would that I had it. So easy to cure one’s self! Oh, the self is the wonder that is so dark and is so bright, so strong and so feeble!” She looked at him sombrely, hunger in her face. “If you said all that outside--” “Aye, indeed, if I said it! Morgen Fay that has ’scaped sheet and candle all these years might have them now, but for a different reason! I’ll not say it outside--nor inside on a different day. To-day I would tell the truth, for there is no sparkle in lying!” She brooded over the fire. “What is the truth? Now I believe what I have said--and to-morrow I might go swimming toward a miracle! I have swam so in the past--believed with the shoal there was food there. But no! It shall not be again toward dead-white bone!” He began, blue-eyed, young and keen, to talk of travel that he wanted so badly! He was talking as youth might talk to motherhood, who always listened. Cathay and Ind by the western way! They hung over the fire, the fog came about the house; they were far, far, far away! When it was growing dusk, before Ailsa brought the candles, he went through the window and down as he had come to his boat,--and so off like a moth. If he had not left Morgen Fay gay of heart, yet listening and speaking, and never a caress between, liking this boy and travelling a bit with him, her mood was less ashen, or began to glow amid its ashes. She bent herself over the fire, she put her locked hands over her forehead, she rocked herself; desire and mind went wandering together. “Forest--forest deep and still. Landless sea, salt and clean. Solitude, solitude--and out of it the Miracle rising--and Morgen Fay dead at its feet--but I safe forever, healed forever! But it will not come, my Miracle, it will not come, it will not come!” The dark increased. Ailsa brought the candles. The next eve brought Somerville,--alone, in mood of return but not otherwise in good mood. A man of many levels, something had crossed him and he perched to-day upon one of the lower levels of himself. Morgen Fay’s mood to-night was soulless, hard and reckless. She was not nightingale, nor moon in the sky, nor lion-woman nor panther-woman; she was nearer the slut that Ailsa would have under her fingers. She drank much wine with Somerville.