no fear
of anything that lives. No doubt some people have that power. I have
never seen her attract birds and beasts as he certainly did, but she is
quite as fond of them."

I could not understand her blindness--what I myself had seen raised
questions I found unanswerable, and her mother saw nothing! Which of us
was right? presently she came back slowly and I ventured no word.

A woodland sorcery, innocent as the dawn, hovered about her. What was
it? Did the mere love of these creatures make a bond between her soul
and theirs, or was the ancient dream true and could she at times move
in the same vibration? I thought of her as a wood-spirit sometimes, an
expression herself of some passion of beauty in Nature, a thought of
snows and starry nights and flowing rivers made visible in flesh. It is
surely when seized with the urge of some primeval yearning which in
man is merely sexual that Nature conceives her fair forms and manifests
them, for there is a correspondence that runs through all creation.

Here I ask myself--Did I love her? In a sense, yes, deeply, but not in
the common reading of the phrase. I have trembled with delight before
the wild and terrible splendour of the Himalayan heights-; low golden
moons have steeped my soul longing, but I did not think of these things
as mine in any narrow sense, nor so desire them. They were Angels of the
Evangel of beauty. So too was she. She had none of the "silken nets and
traps of adamant," she was no sister of the "girls of mild silver or of
furious gold;"--but fair, strong, and her own, a dweller in the House of
Quiet. I did not covet her. I loved her.

Days passed. There came a night when the winds were loosed--no moon,
the stars flickering like blown tapers through driven clouds, the trees
swaying and lamenting.

"There will be rain tomorrow." Mrs. Ingmar said, as we parted for the
night. I closed my door. Some great cat of the woods was crying harshly
outside my window, the sound receding towards the bridle way. I slept in
a dream of tossing seas and ships labouring among them.

With the sense of a summons I waked--I cannot tell when. Unmistakable,
as if I were called by name. I rose and dressed, and heard distinctly
bare feet passing my door. I opened it noiselessly and looked out into
the little passage way that made for the entry, and saw nothing but
pools of darkness and a dim light from the square of the window at the
end. But the wind had swept the sky clear