When Helena came back, she sat opposite to him to see him. His naïve look of joy was very sweet to her. His eyes were dark blue, showing the fibrils, like a purple-veined flower at twilight, and somehow, mysteriously, joy seemed to quiver in the iris. Helena appreciated him, feature by feature. She liked his clear forehead, with its thick black hair, and his full mouth, and his chin. She loved his hands, that were small, but strong and nervous, and very white. She liked his breast, that breathed so strong and quietly, and his arms, and his thighs, and his knees. For him, Helena was a presence. She was ambushed, fused in an aura of his love. He only saw she was white, and strong, and full fruited, he only knew her blue eyes were rather awful to him. Outside, the sea-mist was travelling thicker and thicker inland. Their lodging was not far from the bay. As they sat together at tea, Siegmund’s eyes dilated, and he looked frowning at Helena. “What is it?” he asked, listening uneasily. Helena looked up at him, from pouring out the tea. His little anxious look of distress amused her. “The noise, you mean? Merely the fog-horn, dear—not Wotan’s wrath, nor Siegfried’s dragon….” The fog was white at the window. They sat waiting. After a few seconds the sound came low, swelling, like the mooing of some great sea animal, alone, the last of the monsters. The whole fog gave off the sound for a second or two, then it died down into an intense silence. Siegmund and Helena looked at each other. His eyes were full of trouble. To see a big, strong man anxious-eyed as a child because of a strange sound amused her. But he was tired. “I assure you, it _is_ only a fog-horn,” she laughed. “Of course. But it is a depressing sort of sound.” “Is it?” she said curiously. “Why? Well—yes—I think I can understand its being so to some people. It’s something like the call of the horn across the sea to Tristan.” She hummed softly, then three times she sang the horn-call. Siegmund, with his face expressionless as a mask, sat staring out at the mist. The boom of the siren broke in upon them. To him, the sound was full of fatality. Helena waited till the noise died down, then she repeated her horn-call. “Yet it is very much like the fog-horn,” she said, curiously interested. “This time next week, Helena!” he said. She suddenly went heavy, and stretched across to clasp his hand as it lay upon the table. “I shall be calling to you from Cornwall,” she said. He did not reply. So often she did not take his meaning, but left him alone with his sense of tragedy. She had no idea how his life was wrenched from its roots, and when he tried to tell her, she balked him, leaving him inwardly quite lonely. “There is _no_ next week,” she declared, with great cheerfulness. “There is only the present.”