"Maybe I'm--more used to this light," he said gropingly. "--And anyway, you said you thought you'd seen them and thought it was only a dream." Halfway between exasperation and a deep pity, Helen found herself arguing, "If these other people of yours really exist, why haven't they made themselves known in sixteen years?" The eagerness with which he answered was almost frightening. "I think they only come out at night, they're what your book calls a primitive civilization--" He spoke the words he had read, but never heard, with an odd hesitation. "They're not really a civilization at all, I think, they're like--part of the woods." "A forest people," Helen mused, impressed in spite of herself, "and nocturnal. It's always moonlight or dusky when you see them--" "Then you _do_ believe me--oh, Helen," Robin cried, and suddenly found himself pouring out the story of what he had seen, in incoherent words, concluding "--and by daylight I can hear them, but I can't see them--Helen, Helen, you have to believe it now, you'll have to let me try to find them and learn to talk to them--" Helen listened with a sinking heart. She knew they should not discuss it now, when five days of enforced housebound proximity had set their nerves and tempers on edge, but some unknown tension hurled her sharp words at Robin. "You saw a woman, and I--a man. These things are only dreams. Do I have to explain more to you?" Robin flung his knife sullenly aside. "You're so blind, so stubborn--" "I think you are feverish again." Helen rose to go. He said wrathfully, "You treat me like a child!" "Because you act like one, with your fairy tales of women in the wind...." Suddenly Robin's agony overflowed and he caught at her, holding her around the knees, clinging to her as he had not done since he was a small child, his words stumbling and rushing over one another. "Helen, Helen darling, don't be angry with me," he begged, and caught her in a blind embrace that pulled her off her feet. She had never guessed how strong he was; but he seemed very like a little boy, and she hugged him quickly as he began to cover her face with childish kisses. "Don't cry, Robin, my baby, it's all right," she murmured, kneeling close to him. Gradually the wildness of his passionate crying abated; she touched his forehead with her cheek to see if it were heated with fever, and he reached up and held her there. Helen let him lie against her shoulder, feeling that perhaps after the violence of his outburst he would fall asleep, and she was half asleep herself when a sudden shock of realization darted through her; quickly she tried to free herself from Robin's entangling arms. "Robin, let me go." He clung to her, not understanding. "Don't let go of me, Helen. Darling, stay here beside me," he begged, and pressed a kiss into her throat.