His thoughts returned to Norah, and here again—­here more plainly than anywhere else—­he saw the work of God.  It was wonderful and awe-inspiring how God had selected the instrument that should destroy him.  He felt that he could have resisted the charms of any other girl in the world except this one.  In mysterious ways Norah’s fascination was potent over him, while it might have been quite feeble in its effects with regard to other men.  But for Dale she represented the solid embodiment of imagined seductiveness, allurement, supreme feminine charm; that flicker of wild blood in her was to him an essential attraction, and it linked itself inexplicably with the amorous reveries of far-off days when, young and free and wild himself, he loved the woodland glades instead of hating them.

The selected instrument—­Yes, she was the one girl on earth who could have been safely employed to achieve God’s double purpose of overwhelming him with base passion and bringing his lesson home to him simultaneously.  No other girl that ever was born could have aroused such desire in him, and yet have slipped unscathed out of his arms at the very moment when the consummation of his sin seemed unavoidable.  Any other girl must herself have been sacrificed in destroying him; only the child who had frightened him in the wood could instantaneously, by a few unconsidered words, have taken all the fire out of him and changed his heart to a lump of ice.  That was a stroke of the Master:  most Godlike in its care for the innocent and its confusion of the guilty.

He remembered how grievously he had dreaded this child—­the little black-haired elf that had seen him hiding.  It had made him shiver to think of her—­the small woodland demon, the devil’s spy whose lisping treble might be distinct and loud enough to utter his death sentence.  A thousand times he had wondered about her—­thinking:  “She is growing up.  She belongs here;” looking in the faces of cottagers’ children and asking himself:  “Are you she?  Or you?  Or you?” Then he had left off thinking about her.

She had come into his life again, into his very home, and he had never once asked himself:  “Is Norah she?” No, because God would not allow him to do so; it had suited God’s purpose to paralyze the outlet of all natural thought in that direction.  So she grew tall and strong under his eyes—­the dreaded imp of the wood eating his food, squatting at his own fireside; changing into the imagined nymph of the wood that he had seen only in dreams; becoming the very spirit of the wood—­yes, the wood’s avenging spirit.

He moved from his recumbent position, sat up, and drew out Norah’s letter from the breast pocket of his jacket.  He read her letter again, and his sadness and despair deepened.  There was no revolt now; he felt nothing but black misery.  He thought:  “I used to fear that she would be the means of my death, and now death is coming from her.  This letter is my death-warrant.”