“Ay, if you wish to,” he answered, altogether willing. He was filled with an easiness that would comply with her every wish.
They went out softly, walked in silence to the bay. There they stood at the head of the white, living moonpath, where the water whispered at the casement of the land seductively.
“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.