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."

The effect on Miltoun might perhaps have been different had he not been
so conscious of his intention to ask Audrey Noel to be his wife; but in
any circumstances it is doubtful whether he would have done more than
smile, and tear the paper up. Truly that sort of thing had so littl