“It’s the finest night I have seen,” said Siegmund. Helena’s eyes suddenly filled with tears, at his simplicity of happiness. “I like the moon on the water,” she said. “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 ivory of her face. His heart tightened with tenderness, and he laughed, then bent to kiss her. “The key of the castle,” he said. He put his face against hers, and felt on his cheek the smart of her tears. “It’s all very grandiose,” he said comfortably, “but it does for tonight, all this that I say.” “It is true for ever,” she declared. “In so far as tonight is eternal,” he said. He remained, with the wetness of her cheek smarting on his, looking from under his brows at the white transport of the water beneath the moon. They stood folded together, gazing into the white heart of the night. VI Siegmund woke with wonder in the morning. “It is like the magic tales,” he thought, as he realized where he was; “and I am transported to a new life, to realize my dream! Fairy-tales are true, after all.” He had slept very deeply, so that he felt strangely new. He issued with delight from the dark of sleep into the sunshine. Reaching out his hand, he felt for his watch. It was seven o’clock. The dew of a sleep-drenched night glittered before his eyes. Then he laughed and forgot the night. The creeper was tapping at the window, as a little wind blew up the sunshine. Siegmund put out his hands for the unfolding happiness of the morning. Helena was in the next room, which she kept inviolate. Sparrows in the creeper were shaking shadows of leaves among the sunshine; milk-white shallop of cloud stemmed bravely across the bright sky; the sea would be blossoming with a dewy shimmer of sunshine.