The garden in front of their house, where Helena was waiting for him,
was long and crooked, with a sunken flagstone pavement running up to the
door by the side of the lawn. On either hand the high fence of the
garden was heavy with wild clematis and honeysuckle. Helena sat
sideways, with a map spread out on her bench under the bushy little
laburnum tree, tracing the course of their wanderings. It was very
still. There was just a murmur of bees going in and out the brilliant
little porches of nasturtium flowers. The nasturtium leaf-coins stood
cool and grey; in their delicate shade, underneath in the green
twilight, a few flowers shone their submerged gold and scarlet. There
was a faint scent of mignonette. Helena, like a white butterfly in the
shade, her two white arms for antennae stretching firmly to the bench,
leaned over her map. She was busy, very busy, out of sheer happiness.
She traced word after word, and evoked scene after scene. As she
discovered a name, she conjured up the place. As she moved to the next
mark she imagined the long path lifting and falling happily.
She was waiting for Siegmund, yet his hand upon the latch startled her.
She rose suddenly, in agitation. Siegmund was standing in the sunshine
at the gate. They greeted each other across the tall roses.
When Siegmund was holding her hand, he said, softly laughing: 'You have come out of the water very beautiful this morning.' She laughed. She was not beautiful, but she felt so at that moment. She
glanced up at him, full of love and gratefulness.
'And you,' she murmured, in a still tone, as if it were almost
sacrilegiously unnecessary to say it.
Siegmund was glad. He rejoiced to be told he was beautiful. After a few
moments of listening to the bees and breathing the mignonette, he said: 'I found a little white bay, just like you--a virgin bay. I had to swim
there.' 'Oh!' she said, very interested in him, not in the fact.
'It seemed just like you. Many things seem like you,' he said.
She laughed again in her joyous fashion, and the reed-like vibration
came into her voice.
'I saw the sun through the cliffs, and the sea, and you,' she said.
He did not understand. He looked at her searchingly. She was white and
still and inscrutable. Then she looked up at him; her earnest eyes, that
would not flinch, gazed straight into him. He trembled, and things all
swept into a blur. After she had taken away her eyes he found
himself saying: 'You know, I felt as if I were the first man to discover things: like
Adam when he opened the first eyes in the world.' 'I saw the sunshine in you,' repeated Helena quietly, looking at him
with her eyes heavy with meaning.