he repeated, “when I see your eyes there—wide awake?”
She only smiled and stroked him, for she did not understand him, and thought he did not know what he was saying.
“Was it a dream then?” resumed Photogen, rubbing his eyes. But with that his memory came clear, and he shuddered, and cried, “Oh horrible! horrible! to be turned all at once into a coward! a shameful, contemptible, disgraceful coward! I am ashamed—ashamed—and so frightened! It is all so frightful!”
“What is so frightful?” asked Nycteris, with a smile like that of a mother to her child waked from a bad dream.
“All, all,” he answered; “all this darkness and the roaring.”
“My dear,” said Nycteris, “there is no roaring. How sensitive you must be! What you hear is only the walking of the water, and the running about of the sweetest of all the creatures. She is invisible, and I call her Everywhere, for she goes through all the other creatures and comforts them. Now she is amusing herself, and them too, with shaking them and kissing them, and blowing in their faces. Listen: do you call that roaring? You should hear her when she is rather angry though! I don’t know why, but she is sometimes, and then she does roar a little.”
“It is so horribly dark!” said Photogen, who, listening while she spoke, had satisfied himself that there was no roaring.
“Dark!” she echoed. “You should be in my room when an earthquake has killed my lamp. I do not understand. How can you call this dark? Let me see: yes, you have eyes, and big ones, bigger than Madam Watho’s or Falca’s—not so big as mine, I fancy—only I never saw mine. But then—oh yes!—I know now what is the matter! You can’t see with them because they are so black. Darkness can’t see, of course. Never mind: I