then I moved in a world in which the strange
"came true." It was the coming true that was the proof of the
enchantment, which, moreover, was naturally never so great as when such
coming was, to such a degree and by the most romantic stroke of all, the
fruit of one's own wizardry. I was positively--so had the wheel
revolved--proud of my work. I had thought it all out, and to have
thought it was, wonderfully, to have brought it. Yet I recall how I even
then knew on the spot that there was something supreme I should have
failed to bring unless I had happened suddenly to become aware of the
very presence of the haunting principle, as it were, of my thought. This
was the light in which Mrs. Server, walking alone now, apparently, in
the grey wood and pausing at sight of me, showed herself in her clear
dress at the end of a vista. It was exactly as if she had been there by
the operation of my intelligence, or even by that--in a still happier
way--of my feeling. My excitement, as I have called it, on seeing her,
was assuredly emotion. Yet what _was_ this feeling, really?--of which,
at the point we had thus reached, I seemed to myself to have gathered
from all things an invitation to render some account.

Well, I knew within the minute that I was moved by it as by an
extraordinary tenderness; so that this is the name I must leave it to
make the best of. It had already been my impression that I was sorry for
her, but it was marked for me now that I was sorrier than I had
reckoned. All her story seemed at once to look at me out of the fact of
her present lonely prowl. I met it without demur, only wanting her to
know that if I struck her as waylaying her in the wood, as waiting for
her there at eventide with an idea, I shouldn't in the least defend
myself from the charge. I can scarce clearly tell how many fine strange
things I thought of during this brief crisis of her hesitation. I wanted
in the first place to make it end, and while I moved a few steps toward
her I felt almost as noiseless and guarded as if I were trapping a bird
or stalking a fawn. My few steps brought me to a spot where another
perspective crossed our own, so that they made together a verdurous
circle with an evening sky above and great lengthening, arching recesses
in which the twilight thickened. Oh, it was quite sufficiently the
castle of enchantment, and when I noticed four old stone seats, massive
and mossy and symmetrically placed, I recognised not only th