They stared at each other for a long while in silence. When they finally embraced, it was with the shared fear of two people that come to realise life's impermanence for the first time.
"Ah, Lily . . . this is going to be a very strange experience for you."
Sighing, pressing her cheek against the top of his head, she shrugged. "Not so very strange, I think. Dorain told me that it is a new experience for each woman in her turn." Her mood became sober, then. "Anest, my husband?"
"Yes?"
"Do you still think that I should attempt to free myself from our joining?"
With a deep sigh he extricated himself somewhat, considering, as though for the first time, the young faerie woman who would otherwise never have known the dim, rude, unlighted interior of a human dwelling, nor of all the woes and cares of a wholly self-involved people, or of himself and the private world they had made together. A world that now would grow by one.
Gone was the carefree child of nature who was born to the untroubled world of warm summer days and laughter, of wildflowers on the wind-blown meadow and the sunshine dappled waters of a clear, new-risen spring. In her place sat a beautiful young woman, his wife, soon to be a mother to the child they had made together.