the soil (these last reverberating through our filmiest dreams, like
the sound of thunder in a blossoming orchard). The echoes are in us of
great voices long gone hence, the unknown cries of huge beasts on the
mountains; the sullen aims of creatures in the slime; the love-call of
the bittern. We know, too, echoes of things outside our ken--the
thought that shapes itself in the bee's brain and becomes a waxen box
of sweets; the tyranny of youth stirring in the womb; the crazy terror
of small slaughtered beasts; the upward push of folded grass, and how
the leaf feels in all its veins the cold rain; the ceremonial that
passes yearly in the emerald temples of bud and calyx--we have walked
those temples; we are the sacrifice on those altars. And the future
floats on the current of our blood like a secret argosy. We hear the
ideals of our descendants, like songs in the night, long before our
firstborn is begotten. We, in whom the pollen and the dust, sprouting
grain and falling berry, the dark past and the dark future, cry and
call--we ask, Who is this Singer that sends his voice through the dark
forest, and inhabits us with ageless and immortal music, and sets the
long echoes rolling for evermore?

The audience, however, did not notice that there were echoes in Hazel,
and would have gaped if you had proclaimed God in her voice. They
looked at her with critical eyes that were perfectly blind to her real
self. Mrs. Marston thought what a pity it was that she looked so wild;
Martha thought it a pity that she did not wear a chenille net over her
hair to keep it neat; and Abel, peering up at her through the strings
of the harp and looking--with his face framed in wild red hair--like a
peculiarly intelligent animal in a cage, did not think of her at all.

But Edward made up for them, because he thought of her all the time.
Before the end of the concert he had got as far as to be sure she was