help you."

"He didn't in my dream," she said doubtfully. She raised long,
stealthy eyes to mine, and spoke softly and deliberately. "Besides,
there isn't any little boy."

"None, Annabel Lee?" I said.

"Why," she answered, "I have played here years and years and years,
and there are only the gulls and terns and cormorants, and that!" She
pointed with her spade towards the broken water.

"You know all their names then?" I said.

"Some I know," she answered with a little frown, and looked far out to
sea. Then, turning her eyes, she gazed long at me, searchingly,
forlornly on a stranger. "I am going home now," she said.

I looked at the house of sand and smiled. But she shook her head once
more.

"It never _could_ be finished," she said firmly, "though I tried and
tried, unless the sea would keep quite still just once all day,
without going to and fro. And then," she added with a flash of
anger--"then I would not build."

"Well," said I, "when it is nearly finished, and the water washes up,
and up, and washes it away, here is a flower that came from
Fairyland. And that, dear heart, is none so far away."

She took the purple flower I had plucked in Ennui's garden in her
slim, cold hand.

"It's amaranth," she said; and I have never seen so old a little look
in a child's eyes.

"And all the flowers' names too?" I said.

She frowned again. "It's amaranth," she said, and ran off lightly and
so deftly among the rocks and in the shadow that was advancing now
even upon the foam of the sea, that she had vanished before I had time
to deter, or to pursue her. I sought her awhile, until the dark rack
of sunset obscured the light, and the sea's voice changed; then I
desisted.

It was useless to remain longer beneath the looming caves, among the
stones of so inhospitable a shore. I was a stranger to the tides. And
it was clear high-water would submerge the narrow sands whereon I
stood.

Yet I cannot describe how loth I was to leave to night's desolation
the shapeless house of a child. What fate was this that had set her
to such profitless labour on the uttermost shores of "Tragedy"? What
history lay behind, past, or, as it were, never to come? What gladness
too high for earth had nearly once been hers? Her sea-mound took
strange shapes in the gloom--light foliage of stone, dark heaviness of
granite, wherein rumour played of all that restless rustling; small
cries, vast murmurings from those green meadows, old as ni