“I believe,” he said slowly, “I can see the stars moving through your hair. No, keep still, you can’t see them.” Helena lay obediently very still. “I thought I could watch them travelling, crawling like gold flies on the ceiling,” he continued in a slow sing-song. “But now you make your hair tremble, and the stars rush about.” Then, as a new thought struck him: “Have you noticed that you can’t recognize the constellations lying back like this. I can’t see one. Where is the north, even?”
She laughed at the idea of his questioning her concerning these things. She refused to learn the names of the stars or of the constellations, as of the wayside plants. “Why should I want to label them?” she would say. “I prefer to look at them, not to hide them under a name.” So she laughed when he asked her to find Vega or Arcturus.
“How full the sky is!” Siegmund dreamed on—“like a crowded street. Down here it is vastly lonely in comparison. We’ve found a place far quieter and more private than the stars, Helena. Isn’t it fine to be up here, with the sky for nearest neighbour?”
“I did well to ask you to come?” she inquired wistfully. He turned to her.
“As wise as God for the minute,” he replied softly. “I think a few furtive angels brought us here—smuggled us in.”
“And you are glad?” she asked. He laughed.
“Carpe diem,” he said. “We have plucked a beauty, my dear. With this rose in my coat I dare go to hell or anywhere.”
“Why hell, Siegmund?” she asked in displeasure.
