“Don’t be afraid, Stella. I’m Jerome.”
And he stopped, stood still where he had emerged from shadow into the moonlight.
She could see him distinctly. She was grasping the pitcher of water with both hands—not that it was the last pitcher in existence, nor that she was so very much concerned about the water, for there was ever so much more of it; she clung to the pitcher, rather, the way Jerome had been clinging to the heavenly bodies. There had to be something perfectly regular, like pitchers or stars, to keep hold of.
But when she saw it really was Jerome, she sat down very limply on the top step and did a tremendously natural thing: she began crying—tears that had burned long, unreleased, when she had thought there were no more tears left.
II
Inside, the temple was just a single tiny room with an altar against the far wall. The altar was a crude affair, with a “holy of holies” containing an undersized image of the goddess Amaterasu. Two small windows high up let in the moonlight. Still, it was so dark after the comparative brightness without that at first it was possible to distinguish very little. Stella drew the paper door back across the opening through which they had entered. After that, to the outer world the temple presented its usual blank and uninhabited look.
“We must be quiet,” she said, her voice much shaken with terror and tears. “Shall we sit down on the floor?”
The gleam of hysterical wildness in her eyes cautioned him she must be humoured; and he realized, too, that as yet she knew none of the particulars behind his presence. What an amazing situation it was—what an amazing proposition life was, anyhow, that it should evolve such moments as this under an unperturbed sky, and with everything else about the universe intact....
They sat there facing each other on the floor, in the centre of the temple to the goddess Amaterasu, and at first the immense strangeness of it all put a restriction upon speech: there was so much to be asked and so much to be answered that a sense of painful self-consciousness played conspirator with the so slowly subsiding shock of this coming together—out of a void, as it were.
When at last she spoke, it was in a tense whisper: “Did you come in the Star of Troy?”