The moon was floating like a huge pearl of silver through vast seas of blue. The sleeping flowers were closed, like half-extinguished censers, breathing faint incense on the night's pale brow. From some dark bough a nightingale was shaking down a flood of song. The fountains from their stone basins leaped moonward in the passion of their love and seemed to fall sobbing back to earth. The night air breathed hot and languorous across the gardens of the Pincian Mount. Lutes tinkled here and there. And the magic of the night thrilled Tristan's soul. As in a trance his gaze followed the white figure that was moving noiselessly down a moss grown path. A thick hedge of laurel concealed her now. Then she paused as if she, too, were enraptured by the magic of the night.
The moon illumined the central lawn and the whispering fountains. Tall cypresses seemed to intensify the shade. In the distance he could faintly discern the white balustrade, crowning a terrace where green alleys wound obscurely beneath the canopy of darkest oak, and moss and violet made their softest bed. In the very centre of it was a small domed temple, a shrine to Love.
Tristan's senses began to swoon. Was it a hallucination—was it reality? A moon maiden she seemed, made mortal for a night, to teach all comers love in the sacred grove.
"Hellayne! Hellayne!"
His voice sounded strange to his own ears.
As in a dream he saw her come towards him. She came so silent and so pale in the spectral light that he feared lest it was the spectre of his mind that came to meet him. And once more the voice cried "Hellayne!" and then they lay in each other's arms. All her reluctance, all her doubts seemed to have flown at the sound of her name from his lips.
"Hellayne! Hellayne!" he whispered deliriously, kissing her eyes, her hair, her sweet lips, and folding her so close to him, as if he would never again part from her he loved better than life. "At last I have found you! How came you here? Speak! Is it indeed yourself, or is it some mocking spirit that has borrowed your form?"
And again he kissed her and their eyes held silent commune.
"It is I who have just refound you!" she whispered, as he looked enraptured into the sweet girlish face, the face that had not changed since he had left Avalon, though she seemed to have become more womanly, and in her eyes lay a pathetic sorrow.
What a rapture there was in that clear tone. But she trembled as she spoke. Would he understand? Would he believe?