against the ground, by clutching the
stalks of the bracken--an ache, an emptiness too dreadful! Youth to
youth! He was gone from her--and she was alone again! She did not cry.
What good in crying? But gusts of shame kept sweeping through her; shame
and rage. So this was all she was worth! The sun struck hot on her back
in that lair of tangled fern, where she had fallen; she felt faint and
sick. She had not known till now quite what this passion for the boy had
meant to her; how much of her very belief in herself was bound up with
it; how much clinging to her own youth. What bitterness! One soft slip
of a white girl--one YOUNG thing--and she had become as nothing! But
was that true? Could she not even now wrench him back to her with the
passion that this child knew nothing of! Surely! Oh, surely! Let him
but once taste the rapture she could give him! And at that thought she
ceased clutching at the bracken stalks, lying as still as the very stones
around her. Could she not? Might she not, even now? And all feeling,
except just a sort of quivering, deserted her--as if she had fallen into
a trance. Why spare this girl? Why falter? She was first! He had been
hers out there. And she still had the power to draw him. At dinner the
first evening she had dragged his gaze to her, away from that girl--away
from youth, as a magnet draws steel. She could still bind him with
chains that for a little while at all events he would not want to break!
Bind him? Hateful word! Take him, hankering after what she could not
give him--youth, white innocence, Spring? It would be infamous,
infamous! She sprang up from the fern, and ran along the hillside, not
looking where she went, stumbling among the tangled growth, in and out of
the boulders, till she once more sank breathless on to a stone. It was
bare of trees just here, and she could see, across the river valley, the
high larch-crowned tor on the far side. The sky was clear--the sun
bright. A hawk was wheeling over that hill; far up, very near the blue!
Infamous! She could not do that! Could not drug him, drag him to her by
his senses, by all that was least high in him, when she wished for him
all the finest things that life could give, as if she had been his
mother. She could not. It would be wicked! In that moment of intense
spiritual agony, those two down there in the sun, by the grey stone and
the dark water, seemed guarded from her, protected. The girl'