window, and showed the moon as a slim lady waiting for unlooked-for
happenings--he could have wept at the crude sweetness of Hazel. She was
of so ruthless an honesty towards herself as well as others; she had
such strange lights and shadows in her eyes, her voice, her soul; she
was so full of faults, and so brimming with fascination.

'Oh, God, if I may have her to keep and defend, to glow in my house
like a rose, I'll ask no more,' he murmured.

The pine-tops bowed in as stately a manner as they had when Hazel
cried, 'I'll never be a woman!' They listened like grown-ups to the
prattle of a child. And the stars, like gods in silver armour sitting
afar in halls of black marble, seemed to hear and disdain the little
gnat-like voice, as they heard Vessons' defiant 'Never will I!' and
Mrs. Marston's woolly prayers, and Reddin's hoof-beats. All man's
desires--predatory, fugitive, or merely negative--wander away into
those dark halls, and are heard no more. Among the pillars of the night
is there One who listens and remembers, and judges the foolishness of
man, not by effects, but by motives? And does that One, in the majesty
of everlasting vitality and resistless peace, ever see how we run after
the painted butterflies of our desires and fall down the dark
precipice? And if He sees and hears the wavering, calamitous life of
all creatures, and especially of the most beautiful and the most
helpless, does He ever sigh and weep, as we do when we see a dead child
or a moth's wing impaled on a thorn?

Our heavy burden is that we cannot know. For all our tears and prayers
and weary dreaming, we cannot know.

Edward lay awake all night, and heard the first blackbird begin,