He led her to her tree, where she seated herself regally as before.  He poured his sheaves of hyacinths as tribute into her lap.  As his hands touched hers her cold face flushed again and softened.  He stretched himself beside her and love stirred in her heart, unforbidden, as in a happy dream.  He watched the movements of her delicate fingers as they played with the tangled hyacinth bells.  Her hands were wet with the thick streaming juice of the torn stalks; she stretched them out to him helplessly.  He knelt before her, and spread his handkerchief on his knees, and took her hands and wiped them.  She let them rest in his for a moment, and, with a low, panting cry, he bowed his head and covered them with kisses.

At his cry her lips parted.  And as her soul had called to him across the spiritual ramparts, so her eyes said to him:  “Come”; and he knew that with all her body and her soul she yearned to him and consented.

He held her tight by the wrists and drew her to him; and she laid her arms lightly on his neck and kissed him.

“I’m glad now,” she whispered, “that Edith didn’t tell me.  She knew you.  Oh, my dear, she knew.”

And to herself she said proudly:  “It rests with me.”

BOOK II

CHAPTER XI

It was October, five months after Anne’s birthday.  She was not to know again the mood which determined her complete surrender.  Supreme moods can never be recaptured or repeated.  The passion that inspires them is unique, self-sacrificial, immortal only through fruition; doomed to pass and perish in its exaltation.  She would know tenderness, but never just that tenderness; gladness, but never that gladness; peace, but never the peace that possessed her in the woods at Westleydale.

The new soul in her moved steadily, to a rhythm which lacked the diviner thrill of the impulse which had given it birth.  It was but seldom that the moment revived in memory.  If Anne had accounted to herself for that day, she would have said that they had taken the nine-fifty train to Westleydale, that they had had a nice luncheon, that the weather was exceptionally fine, and that well, yes, certainly, that day had been the beginning of their entirely satisfactory relations.  Anne’s mind had a tendency to lapse into the commonplace when not greatly stirred.  Happily for her, she had a refuge from it in her communion with the Unseen.

Only at times was she conscious of a certain foiled expectancy.  For the greater while it seemed to her that she had attained an indestructible spiritual content.

She conceived a profound affection for her home.  The house in Prior Street became the centre of her earthward thoughts, and she seldom left it for very long.  Her health remained magnificent; her nature being adapted to an undisturbed routine, appeased by the well-ordered, even passage of her days.