I could not understand her blindness - what I myself had seen
raised questions I found unanswerable, and her mother saw
nothing! Which of us was right? presently she came back slowly
and I ventured no word.

A woodland sorcery, innocent as the dawn, hovered about her. What
was it? Did the mere love of these creatures make a bond between
her soul and theirs, or was the ancient dream true and could she
at times move in the same vibration? I thought of her as a
wood-spirit sometimes, an expression herself of some passion of
beauty in Nature, a thought of snows and starry nights and
flowing rivers made visible in flesh. It is surely when seized
with the urge of some primeval yearning which in man is merely
sexual that Nature conceives her fair forms and manifests them,
for there is a correspondence that runs through all creation.

Here I ask myself - Did I love her? In a sense, yes, deeply, but
not in the common reading of the phrase. I have trembled with
delight before the wild and terrible splendour of the Himalayan
heights-; low golden moons have steeped my soul longing, but I
did not think of these things as mine in any narrow sense, nor so
desire them. They were Angels of the Evangel of beauty. So too
was she. She had none of the "silken nets and traps of adamant,"
she was no sister of the "girls of mild silver or of furious
gold"; - but fair, strong, and her own, a dweller in the House of
Quiet. I did not covet her. I loved her.

Days passed. There came a night when the winds were loosed - no
moon, the stars flickering like blown tapers through driven
clouds, the trees swaying and lamenting.