“You know, I felt as if I were the first man to discover things: like Adam when he opened the first eyes in the world.”
“I saw the sunshine in you,” repeated Helena quietly, looking at him with her eyes heavy with meaning.
He laughed again, not understanding, but feeling she meant love.
“No, but you have altered everything,” he said.
The note of wonder, of joy, in his voice touched her almost beyond self-control. She caught his hand and pressed it; then quickly kissed it. He became suddenly grave.
“I feel as if it were right—you and me, Helena—so, even righteous. It is so, isn’t it? And the sea and everything, they all seem with us. Do you think so?”
Looking at her, he found her eyes full of tears. He bent and kissed her, and she pressed his head to her bosom. He was very glad.
IX
The day waxed hot. A few little silver tortoises of cloud had crawled across the desert of sky, and hidden themselves. The chalk roads were white, quivering with heat. Helena and Siegmund walked eastward bareheaded under the sunshine. They felt like two insects in the niche of a hot hearth as they toiled along the deep road. A few poppies here and there among the wild rye floated scarlet in sunshine like blood-drops on green water. Helena recalled Francis Thompson’s poems, which Siegmund had never read. She repeated what she knew, and laughed, thinking what an ineffectual pale shadow of a person Thompson must have been. She looked at Siegmund, walking in large easiness beside her.
“Artists are supremely unfortunate persons,” she announced.