she turned the corner, the forward slant of her body, the upward tilt of her head, the awful irrevocable quality of her movements, the ghostlike glamour the moonlight would lay on her as if to warn him that she was as separate from him as though she were dead.  He would not be able to pursue her, for there was something about her which would prevent him from ever trying on her those ordinary compulsions which men are accustomed to apply to women; quiet, menacing devotion, or persistent roaring importunities, or those forcible embraces, of which he thought with the disgust he now felt for the sexual processes of everybody in the world except himself and Ellen, which induce the body to betray the reluctant mind.  Because he loved her he was obliged, in spite of himself, to acknowledge the sacredness of her will, even though that acknowledgement might frustrate every hope of his love.  He greatly disliked that obligation.

She was abstractedly murmuring defensive things about the Scotch.  “And Scotland is such a lovely place.  Even round here.  Dalmeny.  Cramond Brig.  Hawthornden.  And oh, the Pentlands!  Have you not been to the Pentlands yet?  Oh, but they’re the grandest place in the world.  There are lochs hidden behind the range the way you’d never think.  And waterfalls.  The water comes down red with the peat.  And miles and miles of heather.”

“Take me there, Ellen.”

“Would you like to come?  Let’s go next Saturday.  I’ve got the whole day off.  Mr. James said it was my due, what with the overtime I’ve been doing.  It’ll be lovely.  I’ve had nobody to go with since Rachael Wing went to London.  But would you truly care to come?  It’s just moors.  You’ll not turn up your nose at it?”

“Anywhere I went with you I’d like.”

She started and began to walk on.  It was as if the sheet of tissue had grown too heavy for her young hand and she had dropped it.  Although he went on talking about how much he liked Scotland, and how intelligent he found the workmen at the cordite factory at Broxburn, she hardly answered, but moved her head from side to side like a horse galled by its collar.  Had he thought her a bold girl, fixing up a walk with him so eagerly?  And ought he to have called her by her Christian name?  Of course he was so much older that perhaps he felt that he had a right to do it.  When they passed through the arch into Hume Park Square she saw a light in the dining-room window and said, “Mother’s home before us.”

She did not know that in that minute she had decided the course of her life.  For she did not know that just before she spoke she had sighed, and that Yaverland had heard her and perceived that she sighed because soon they would no longer be alone together.  Perhaps something like fear would have come upon her if she had known how immense he felt with victory; how he contemplated her willingness to love him in a passion of timeless wonder, watching her journey from heaven, stepping from star to star, all the way down the dark whirling earth of his heart; and how even while he felt a solemn agony at his unworthiness he was busily contriving their immediate marriage.  For there was a steely quality about his love that would have been more appropriate to some vindictive purpose.