He opened his lips to speak.  Yes, he could overwhelm her with statistics and figures, all worked out; of shipping and disasters to shipping; of wealth and senseless waste of wealth.  He could bury her beneath evidence taken by Royal Commission and Parliamentary Committee, commissioners’ reports, testimony of shipowners and captains; calculated tables of tides, sets of currents, prevailing winds; results of surveys hydrographical; all the mass of facts he had been accumulating and brooding over for eighteen long months.  But the weight of it closed his lips, and when he opened them again it was to say, “Yes, that is my dream.”

At once he turned his talk upon the light revolving in their faces; began to explain the lenses and their working in short, direct sentences.  She heard his voice, but without following.

Pezzack and the under-keeper had drawn apart to the opposite side of the cage and were talking together.  The lantern hid them, but she caught the murmur of their voices now and again.  She was conscious of having let something slip—­slip away from her for ever.  If she could but recall him, and hold him to his dream!  But this man, talking in short sentences, each one so sharp and clear, was not the Taffy she had known or could ever know.

In the blaze of the lenses suddenly she saw the truth.  He and she had changed places.  She who had used to be so practical—­she was the dreamer now; had come thither following a dream, walking in a dream.  He, the dreaming boy, had become the practical man, firm, clear-sighted, direct of purpose; with a dream yet in his heart, but a dream of great action, a dream he hid from her, certainly a dream in which she had neither part nor lot.  And yet she had made him what he was; not willingly, not by kindness, but by injustice.  What she had given he had taken; and was a stranger to her.

Muffled wings and white breasts began to beat against the glass.  A low-lying haze—­a passing stratum of sea-fog—­had wrapped the light-house for a while, and these were the wings and breasts of sea-birds attracted by the light.  To her they were the ghosts of dead thoughts—­stifled thoughts—­thoughts which had never come to birth—­trying to force their way into the ring of light encompassing and enwrapping her; trying desperately, but foiled by the transparent screen.

Still she heard his voice, level and masterful, sure of his subject.  In the middle of one of his sentences a sharp thud sounded on the pane behind her, as sudden as the crack of a pebble and only a little duller.

“Ah, what is that?” she cried, and touched his arm.

He thrust open one of the windows, stepped out upon the gallery, and returned in less than a minute with a small dead bird in his hand.

“A swallow,” he said.  “They have been preparing to fly for days.  Summer is done, with our work here.”

She shivered.  “Let us go back,” she said.