She crept forth to stand before him at arm’s length. “I thought I could feel that,” she breathed. “Wo~ld you really like to talk with me?” She kindled, she trilled. “Oh, wonderful! Thank you, thank you.”
“What is your name?” He must needs gather courage before he could lay down: “I hight Tauno. Half merman, half human, but altogether of Faerie.”
“And I-“ She hesitated more than he had. “I think I am, I was Nada. I call me Nada.”
He reached out to her. She tiptoed close. They linked hands. Hers were night-cool and somehow not quite solid. He thought that if he took a real hold upon them, his fingers would part their frailty and meet each other: wherefore he gripped as tenderly as he was able. The clasp shivered.
“What are you?” he asked, that he might hear it from her own lips.
“A vilja. A thing of mist and wind and half-remembered dreams-and how glad of your kindness, Tauno!”
Desire, long unslaked, was thick within him. He sought to draw her close. She flowed, she blew from his embrace, to poise trembling beyond his reach. Fear and grief worked their ways across her countenance, which was young to behold but inwardly had grown old. “No, Tauno, I beg you. For your own sake. I’m no more of the living world. You’d die, yourself, if you tried.”
Recalling how Herr Aage had risen from his grave to comfort Lady Else his beloved-simply to comfort her in her misery-and what came of that, Tauno shuddered backward from Nada.
She saw. Briefly, her aloneness ruled her; then she straightened her shoulders (there was the dearest hollow between them, right below the throat) and said, with a shaken smile, “But you needn’t run away, need you, Tauno? Can we not abide a while together?”
They did until morning.