she read again, as though the words had been too lovely to be real,
and she must assure herself of them:

Tears shall take comfort, and turn gems,
And wrongs repent to diadems.

She turned back to the beginning of the poem, and read the title of it:
"A Hymn, to the name and honour of the admirable Saint Teresa--Foundress
of the Reformation of the discalced Carmelites, both men and women: a
woman for angelical height of speculation, for masculine courage of
performance more than a woman: who yet a child outran maturity, and
durst plot a martyrdom."

The prose thrilled her even more intimately than the verse. She cried
within herself: "Why have I never heard of Richard Crashaw? Why did Tom
never tell me?" She became upon the instant a devotee of this Saint
Teresa. She thought inconsequently, with a pang that was also a
reassurance: "George Cannon would never have understood this. But
everyone here understands it." And with hands enfevered, she turned the
pages again, and, after several disappointments, read:

Oh, thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dower of lights and fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove:
By all thy lives and deaths of love:
By thy large draughts of intellectual day;
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they:
By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire,
By this last morning's draught of liquid fire:
By the full kingdom of that final kiss----

She ceased to read. It was as if her soul was crying out: "I also am
Teresa. This is I! This is I!"

And then the door opened, and Martha appeared once more:

"If you please, sir, Mr. Edwin Clayhanger's called."

"Oh... well, I'm nearly finished. Where is he?"

"In the breakfast-room, sir."

"Well, tell him I'll be down in a minute."

"Hilda," said Mrs. Orgreave, "will _you_ mind going and telling him?"

Hilda had replaced the book in its nest, and gone quickly back to her
chair. The entrance of the servant at that moment, to announce Edwin
Clayhanger, seemed to her startlingly dramatic. "What," she thought, "I
am just reading that and he comes!... He hasn't been here for ages, and,
on the very night that I come, he comes!"

"Certainly," she replied to Mrs. Orgreave. And she thought: "This is the
second time she has sent me with a message to Edwin Clayhanger."

Suddenly, she blushed in confusion before the mistress of the home. "Is
it possible," she asked herself,--"is it possi