“Oh! you love me,” said Gwynplaine.  “I, too, have but you on earth.  You are all in all to me.  Dea, what would you have me do?  What do you desire?  What do you want?”

Dea answered,—­

“I do not know.  I am happy.”

“Oh,” replied Gwynplaine, “we are happy.”

Ursus raised his voice severely,—­

“Oh, you are happy, are you?  That’s a crime.  I have warned you already.  You are happy!  Then take care you aren’t seen.  Take up as little room as you can.  Happiness ought to stuff itself into a hole.  Make yourselves still less than you are, if that can be.  God measures the greatness of happiness by the littleness of the happy.  The happy should conceal themselves like malefactors.  Oh, only shine out like the wretched glowworms that you are, and you’ll be trodden on; and quite right too!  What do you mean by all that love-making nonsense?  I’m no duenna, whose business it is to watch lovers billing and cooing.  I’m tired of it all, I tell you; and you may both go to the devil.”

And feeling that his harsh tones were melting into tenderness, he drowned his emotion in a loud grumble.

“Father,” said Dea, “how roughly you scold!”

“It’s because I don’t like to see people too happy.”

Here Homo re-echoed Ursus.  His growl was heard from beneath the lovers’ feet.

Ursus stooped down, and placed his hand on Homo’s head.

“That’s right; you’re in bad humour, too.  You growl.  The bristles are all on end on your wolf’s pate.  You don’t like all this love-making.  That’s because you are wise.  Hold your tongue, all the same.  You have had your say and given your opinion; be it so.  Now be silent.”

The wolf growled again.  Ursus looked under the table at him.

“Be still, Homo!  Come, don’t dwell on it, you philosopher!”

But the wolf sat up, and looked towards the door, showing his teeth.

“What’s wrong with you now?” said Ursus.  And he caught hold of Homo by the skin of the neck.

Heedless of the wolf’s growls, and wholly wrapped up in her own thoughts and in the sound of Gwynplaine’s voice, which left its after-taste within her, Dea was silent, and absorbed by that kind of esctasy peculiar to the blind, which seems at times to give them a song to listen to in their souls, and to make up to them for the light which they lack by some strain of ideal music.  Blindness is a cavern, to which reaches the deep harmony of the Eternal.

While Ursus, addressing Homo, was looking down, Gwynplaine had raised his eyes.  He was about to drink a cup of tea, but did not drink it.  He placed it on the table with the slow movement of a spring drawn back; his fingers remained open, his eyes fixed.  He scarcely breathed.

A man was standing in the doorway, behind Dea.  He was clad in black, with a hood.  He wore a wig down to his eyebrows, and held in his hand an iron staff with a crown at each end.  His staff was short and massive.  He was like Medusa thrusting her head between two branches in Paradise.