"You have been walking in your sleep!" he said. "Tell me about it. You must tell me everything, Eleanor, if I am to succeed."
"Not in my sleep," she answered, in a low tone, "but at night, when everything is quiet, the sea calls and calls, and I cannot rest. I woke suddenly this morning at three o'clock, and I went out. Powers, as I walked and listened, the wind and the sea came to me like old friends. I remembered many strange things. I remembered people whose graves the sea has stolen from the land ages ago. I was back in those days myself, Powers. I sang their songs, my heart beat with their joys."
Powers was silent. It had come, then, after all—the great awakening. He looked at her with a curiosity almost reverent. His voice trembled.
"Tell me, of those days," he begged.
She shook her head impatiently.
"They came back to me then," she said, "in the twilight, when the whole world slept, and only the sea kept calling to me. Now they are blotted out. I am afraid to think of them. Powers, help me to forget."
For a moment his love was in the balance against that unconquerable thirst for knowledge which had seemed to him once the whole aim of life. He must look, if only for a second, into that land beyond.
"Eleanor," he said thickly, "tell me what you remembered of those days. Sing me that song. You need not be afraid. It is no sign of madness, this!"
She burst into tears, stretched out her hands—the impulsive gesture of a child, and the desire of his life became suddenly a faint thing beside his great love of her. He drew her tenderly to him.
"Eleanor," he whispered, "you know that I love you. Give yourself to me, to guard and to keep. You are the first woman who has ever come into my life. You will be the last. I will keep you from all harm. I will help you stifle those evil memories. You shall be my wife, and I will teach you that love is the greatest and the sweetest thing in the world."