by men too soon, her girlhood tried to hold her back from womanhood by raising obscure terrors that might last as long as life.  He would wait until she was eighteen.  Yet when the avenue bent at right angles half up the hillside, and they drew together as an army of winds marched down upon them from the mountains, she looked at him through her scattered hair, and her face was wholly a woman’s.  So might a woman smile who was drowning under a deep tide and loved to drown so; yet from a brave wisdom in her eyes it could be seen that she was abandoning herself not to death but to life.  This, beyond all doubt, was adult love, though she herself was not aware of it.  He had only to admit it by some significant speech or act, to rise spiritually to the occasion, and they would be fused together as perpetual lovers.

He was conscious again as he had been when she sat with the coins before her in the little dining-room in Hume Park Square, of an involuntary austerity in his passion which, while he did not see the sense of it, he recognised to be the authentic note of love.  A moment ago, when she still seemed a child, he had been thinking what fun it would be to kiss her suddenly on the very tip of that pink little nose which moved when she talked as a rabbit’s does when it eats, to lay hold of her hands roughly and see how far those ink-stained fingers, still pliable as children’s are, would bend back towards her wrist.  But now that she was a woman the passion between them was so strong that the delight of touching her beloved flesh would have been too great for human nerves to support, and it would have turned to pain.  The mutual knowledge that they loved would be enough to work as many miracles on the visible and invisible world as either of their hearts could stand.  “I love you,” was what he had to say....

It was the strangest thing in the world that he could not say it.  He could not even make a kind movement of his body, a protective slackening of his step and overhanging of her spindrift delicacy with his great height, that might have intimated to her that they were dear friends.  He found himself walking woodenly a pace away from her, and though his soul shouted something hidden round the corner of his mind, it would not let his lips articulate the desperate cry.  He stared at the passing moment as a castaway, gagged, and bound to a raft of pirates, might wake from a delirious sleep, stare dumbly up at the steep side of a galleon that rides slowly, and know that with it rides away his chance of life because he cannot speak.  Love of this girl meant infinite joy and a relief such as nothing before had ever promised him from the black regiment of moods that had for long beleaguered him, self-hatred, doubt of the value of any work on this damned earth, a recurrent tendency to brood on his mother’s wrongs until he was a little mad; and if he did not win her life would be more tormenting in its patent purposelessness than even he, with his immense capacity for abstract rage,