“I am a Pleiad!” Julie explained. “Don’t ask me where the other six are. There was no time for the human things—and a Pleiad was easy, just a puff of light.”
“I remember,” he said, “how glad I was to have found you—only to have you slip out, like a ship in a dream!”
He was regarding her deeply, as if he would search out the things that were printed most indelibly on the plate of her mind.
“You have changed!” he decided abruptly.
“Not quite so young?” She laughed wryly. “Nahal helped to cure that raw curse.”
“Come out on the gallery, and let’s talk!”
They walked to the end of the gallery overlooking the river, which, like a current of silver, stretched down through the city.
“Of course,” she told him, “when you were the means of sending me forth, I went believing that I was going to work miracles. I lived terribly stirred by that idea all the time!”
“And inevitably you must have performed them. It’s the time for miracles!”
“For you, yes.” She looked up admiringly to his heroic height. “But you see, I am only a village school-teacher and not a prince of the East. It was my beloved island, though, down there, my own domain I thought. I was to have done so much, but I really did nothing at all. All my grand purposes came to nothing. I tried to bring peace, and lift up a generation of light—that is, it always seems to me I tried to do that—and they took the children all away from me.”