The dawn came slowly. It was rather cold. Olive wrapped herself in rugs
and went to sleep again. Helena shivered, and stared out of the window.
There appeared a wanness in the night, and Helena felt inexpressibly
dreary. A rosiness spread out far away. It was like a flock of
flamingoes hovering over a dark lake. The world vibrated as the sun
came up.

Helena waked the tipsy men at Exeter, having heard them say that there
they must change. Then she walked the platform, very jaded. The train
rushed on again. It was a most, most wearisome journey. The fields were
very flowery, the morning was very bright, but what were these to her?
She wanted dimness, sleep, forgetfulness. At eight o'clock,
breakfast-time, the 'dauntless three' were driving in a waggonette amid
blazing, breathless sunshine, over country naked of shelter, ungracious
and harsh.

'Why am I doing this?' Helena asked herself.

The three friends, washed, dressed, and breakfasted. It was too hot to
rest in the house, so they trudged to the coast, silently, each feeling
in an ill humour.

When Helena was really rested, she took great pleasure in Tintagel. In
the first place, she found that the cove was exactly, almost identically
the same as the Walhalla scene in _Walküre_; in the second place,
_Tristan_ was here, in the tragic country filled with the flowers of a
late Cornish summer, an everlasting reality; in the third place, it was
a sea of marvellous, portentous sunsets, of sweet morning baths, of
pools blossomed with life, of terrible suave swishing of foam which
suggested the Anadyomene. In sun it was the enchanted land of divided
lovers. Helena for ever hummed fragments of _Tristan_. As she stood on
the rocks she sang, in her little, half-articulate way, bits of Isolde's
love, bits of Tristan's anguish, to Siegmund.