The girl replied softly, like one dealing with a memory.
"But have you done better than the stranger in the legend? Do not the peasants say that he, too, followed, sinking in the water to his knees?"
"I think," continued the man, "that he was one of us; that the thing has been always in our blood. But I think all the others failed. I think that first one of us finally went down as the second one of us went down. I think, I alone have been able to stagger across the sea."
"And to what have you come?" said the girl.
"That is the strange part of it," replied the man. "After all that hideous journey, after all that staggering through the sea, I seem to have come again, like that first one of us, to that ancient city, and, like him, to have entered into the king's palace and sat down."
The girl drew back against the green tile wall of the Egyptian garden.
"You make me afraid," she said.
She spread out her arms against the wall. Her eyes grew wide. Her lips trembled. She stared out over the beautiful estate, made doubly exquisite in the fantastic light.
"I have always been afraid. But how could the sea enter over this? And there is no king, and no saint."
"But there is a woman," said the Duke of Dorset, "'with hair like spun darkness, and eyes like the violet core of the night.'"