Helen didn't answer. She came to him, a small swift-moving figure in
the firelight, and drew him into the warmth. She said, almost humbly,
"I was afraid--the storm--Robin, you're all wet, come to the fire and
dry out."
Robin yielded, his twitching nerves partly soothed by her voice. _How
tiny Helen is_, he thought, _and I can remember that she used to carry
me around on one arm. Now she hardly comes to my shoulder._ She brought
him food and he ate wolfishly, listening to the steady pouring rain,
uncomfortable under Helen's watching eyes. Before his own eyes there
was the clear memory of the woman in the wood, and so vivid was Robin's
imagination, heightened by loneliness and undiluted by any random
impressions, that it seemed to him Helen must see her too. And when she
came to stand beside him, the picture grew so keen in his thoughts that
he actually pulled himself free of her.
The next day dawned gray and still, beaten with long needles of rain.
They stayed indoors by the smoldering fire; Robin, half sick and
feverish from his drenching, sprawled by the hearth too indolent to
move, watching Helen's comings and goings about the room; not realizing
why the sight of her slight, quick form against the gray light filled
him with such pain and melancholy.
The storm lasted four days. Helen exhausted her household tasks and sat
restlessly thumbing through the few books she knew by heart--they had
allowed her to remove all her personal possessions, all the things she
had chosen on a forgotten and faraway Earth for a ten-year star-cruise.
For the first time in years, Helen was thinking again of the life,
the civilization she had thrown away, for Robin who had been a pink
scrap in the circle of her arm and now lay sullen on the hearth, not
speaking, aimlessly whittling a stick with the knife (found discarded
in a heap of rubbish from the _Starholm_) which was his dearest
possession. Helen felt slow horror closing in on her. _What world,
what heritage did I give him, in my madness? This world has driven us
both insane. Robin and I are both a little mad, by Earth's standards.
And when I die, and I will die first, what then?_ At that moment Helen
would have given her life to believe in his old dream of strange people
in the wood.
She flung her book restlessly away, and Robin, as if waiting for that
signal, sat upright and said almost eagerly, "Helen--"
Grateful that he had broken the silence of days, she gave him an
encouraging smile.
"I've been reading your books," he began, diffidently, "and I
read about the sun you came from. It's different from this one.
Suppose--suppose, if there were actually a kind of people here, and
something in this light, or in your eyes, made them invisible to you?"