ven her six years ago. She had come back to sing it. How
extraordinary it all was! She seemed to have drifted like a piece of
seaweed; she lived in the present though it sank beneath her like a
wave. The past she saw dimly, the future not at all; and sitting by her
window she was moved by vague impulses towards infinity. She grew aware
of her own littleness and the vastness overhead--that great unending
enigma represented to her understanding by a tint of blue washed over by
a milky tint. Owen had told her that there were twenty million suns in
the milky way, and that around every one numerous planets revolved. This
earth was but a small planet, and its sun a third-rate sun. On this
speck of earth a being had awakened to a consciousness of the glittering
riddle above his head, but he would die in the same ignorance of its
meaning as a rabbit. The secret of the celestial plan she would never
know. One day she would slip out of consciousness of it; life would
never beckon her again; but the vast plan which she now perceived would
continue to revolve, progressing towards an end which no man, though the
world were to continue for a hundred million years, would ever know.

Her brain seemed to melt in the moonlight, and from the enigma of the
skies her thoughts turned to the enigma of her own individuality. She
was aware that she lived. She was aware that some things were right,
that some things were wrong. She was aware of the strange fortune that
had lured her, that had chosen her out of millions. What did it mean? It
must mean something, just as those stars must mean something--but what?

Opposite to her window there was an open space; it was full of mist and
moonlight; the lights of a distant street looked across it. She too had
said, "'Tis hard upon me, I love my folk above all things, but a great
longing seizes me." That story is the story of human life. What is human
life but a longing for something beyond us, for something we shall not
attain? Again she wondered what her end must be. She must end somehow,
and was it not strange that she could no more answer that simple
question than she could the sublime question which the moon and stars
propounded.... That breathless, glittering peace, was it not wonderful?
It seemed to beckon and allure, and her soul yearned for that peace as
Connla's had for the maiden. Death only could give that peace. Did the
Fairy Maiden mean death? Did the plains of the Ever Living, which the
F