Towards morning, Siegmund went to sleep. For four hours, until seven
o'clock, the womb of sleep received him and nourished him again.

'But it is finest of all to wake,' he said, as the bright sunshine of
the window, and the lumining green sunshine coming through the lifted
hands of the leaves, challenged him into the open.

The morning was exceedingly fair, and it looked at him so gently that
his blue eyes trembled with self-pity. A fragment of scarlet geranium
glanced up at him as he passed, so that amid the vermilion tyranny of
the uniform it wore he could see the eyes of the flower, wistful,
offering him love, as one sometimes see the eyes of a man beneath the
brass helmet of a soldier, and is startled. Everything looked at him
with the same eyes of tenderness, offering him, timidly, a little love.

'They are all extraordinarily sweet,' said Siegmund to the full-mouthed
scabious and the awkward, downcast ragwort. Three or four butterflies
fluttered up and down in agitated little leaps, around him.
Instinctively Siegmund put his hand forward to touch them.

'The careless little beggars!' he said.

When he came to the cliff tops there was the morning, very bravely
dressed, rustling forward with a silken sound and much silken shining to
meet him. The battleships had gone; the sea was blue with a _panier_ of
diamonds; the sky was full with a misty tenderness like love. Siegmund
had never recognized before the affection that existed between him and
everything. We do not realize how tremendously dear and indispensable to
us are the hosts of common things, till we must leave them, and we break
our hearts.