Daeron had greatly underestimated the length of this stream. It had been early afternoon when he had begun following it looking for Lúthien, and it was now well into the night. He was grateful at least that the moon was near full, for in his haste he had brought no torches or other means of making light. He was about to turn back, and leave the rest of his search until the next day, but then he saw a patch of white on the ground ahead of him, shining like snow in the moonlight. Niphredil. He was getting close then. Niphredil tended to spring up wherever Lúthien passed, as though the earth itself were glad to be near her. He pressed on with a renewed urgency, and then, at last, he heard an unmistakable voice, clear and musical.

"It's getting late," he heard Lúthien say, "I must go, or I fear my father may begin to worry."

A second voice spoke then. "Can you not stay a little longer?" it asked. The voice was harsh and had a strange accent, unlike any Daeron had ever heard in Doriath. With some surprise, he realized it was the voice of a man. What was a man doing in Doriath? Thingol's decree said men could not enter, and Melian's power enforced it. Something strange indeed was happening.

"How much longer would you have me stay?" Lúthien asked.

"Oh, just the next fifty years or so," replied the man.

Lúthien laughed. "Oh, is that all then?"

"Well, I have heard that is not such a long time in the eyes of the firstborn," the man insisted.

"It is still a long time to sit in a clearing."

"It does not seem nearly long enough to me, but I fear it is all the time I can offer you," the man said sadly.

"Then this is a strange reversal of how our kinds measure time," commented Lúthien. "But what happens in 50 years? Why is that all the time you can offer me?"

"I will be an old man, if I am even alive at all in that time," the man explained.

"Really?" Lúthien said with surprise. "But you seem so young now! Just how short are men's lives?"

"About sixty or seventy years, if one does not fall to injury or sickness," the man told her. "Though it seems that war takes most of us these days."

"Less than six dozen? That is all?"

"I knew one woman who lived to be eighty-three, but that was unusual."

"Your lives must seem so urgent," Lúthien said. "It must be a constant rush to try to accomplish everything you want in so short a time."

"For many, yes," the man replied. "Not for me though. I had accomplished everything I wanted the first day you held my hand."

"Then I think you should be more ambitious," Lúthien cooed. Then there was a sound, soft and gentle, but it hit Daeron's ears as an axe hits a tree. She had kissed him. That was all Daeron could bear to listen to. In a daze, he set off back to Menegroth.