She puzzled him by her self-possession, so almost hard, her way of refusing to show feeling.’  Yet what a woman she would make if the drying curse of high-caste life were not allowed to stereotype and shrivel her!  If enthusiasm were suffered to penetrate and fertilize her soul!  She reminded him of a great tawny lily.  He had a vision of her, as that flower, floating, freed of roots and the mould of its cultivated soil, in the liberty of the impartial air.  What a passionate and noble thing she might become!  What radiance and perfume she would exhale!  A spirit Fleur-de-Lys!  Sister to all the noble flowers of light that inhabited the wind!

Leaning in the deep embrasure of his window, he looked at anonymous Night.  He could hear the owls hoot, and feel a heart beating out there somewhere in the darkness, but there came no answer to his wondering.  Would she—­this great tawny lily of a girl—­ever become unconscious of her environment, not in manner merely, but in the very soul, so that she might be just a woman, breathing, suffering, loving, and rejoicing with the poet soul of all mankind?  Would she ever be capable of riding out with the little company of big hearts, naked of advantage?  Courtier had not been inside a church for twenty years, having long felt that he must not enter the mosques of his country without putting off the shoes of freedom, but he read the Bible, considering it a very great poem.  And the old words came haunting him:  ’Verily I say unto you, It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.’  And now, looking into the Night, whose darkness seemed to hold the answer to all secrets, he tried to read the riddle of this girl’s future, with which there seemed so interwoven that larger enigma, how far the spirit can free itself, in this life, from the matter that encompasseth.

The Night whispered suddenly, and low down, as if rising from the sea, came the moon, dropping a wan robe of light till she gleamed out nude against the sky-curtain.  Night was no longer anonymous.  There in the dusky garden the statue of Diana formed slowly before his eyes, and behind her—­as it were, her temple—­rose the tall spire of the cypress tree.

CHAPTER XIV

A copy of the Bucklandbury News, containing an account of his evening adventure, did not reach Miltoun till he was just starting on his return journey.  It came marked with blue pencil together with a note.  “My dear Eustace,

“The enclosed—­however unwarranted and impudent—­requires attention.  But we shall do nothing till you come back.

                              “Yours ever,
                                   “William Shropton.”