“Shade!” I said. “Wonderful, immaterial, immortal, whence came you?”
“Whence did I come?” she answered, with the pretty reflection of a smile upon her face. “Out of the storm, O son of Anak!—out of the wild, wet night-wind!”
“And why, and why—to stir me to my inmost soul, and then to leave me?”
“Phœnician,” she said, “I have not left you since we parted. I have been the unseen companion of your goings—I have been the shadowless watcher by your sleep. Mine was the unfelt hand that bore your chin up when you swam with the Christian slave-girl—mine was the arm that has turned, invisibly, a hundred javelins from you—and to-night I am come, by leave of circumstance, thus to see you.”
“I should have thought,” I said, becoming now better at my ease, “that one like you might come or go in scorn of circumstances.”
“Wherein, my dear master, you argue with more simplicity than knowledge. There are needs and necessities to the very verge of the spheres.”
But when I questioned what these were, asking the secret of her wayward visits, she looked at the sleeping Editha, and said I could not understand.
“Yes, by Wodin’s self! but I think I can. Yon fair-cheeked girl helps you. There are a hundred turns and touches in your ways and manners that speak of her, and show whence you got that borrowed life.”
“You are astute, my Saxon thane, and I will not utterly refute you.”
“Then, if you can do this, how was it, Blodwen, you never came when I was Roman?”