em was so strong that the delight of
touching her beloved flesh would have been too great for human nerves to
support, and it would have turned to pain. The mutual knowledge that
they loved would be enough to work as many miracles on the visible and
invisible world as either of their hearts could stand. "I love you," was
what he had to say....

It was the strangest thing in the world that he could not say it. He
could not even make a kind movement of his body, a protective slackening
of his step and overhanging of her spindrift delicacy with his great
height, that might have intimated to her that they were dear friends. He
found himself walking woodenly a pace away from her, and though his soul
shouted something hidden round the corner of his mind, it would not let
his lips articulate the desperate cry. He stared at the passing moment
as a castaway, gagged, and bound to a raft of pirates, might wake from
a delirious sleep, stare dumbly up at the steep side of a galleon that
rides slowly, and know that with it rides away his chance of life
because he cannot speak. Love of this girl meant infinite joy and a
relief such as nothing before had ever promised him from the black
regiment of moods that had for long beleaguered him, self-hatred, doubt
of the value of any work on this damned earth, a recurrent tendency to
brood on his mother's wrongs until he was a little mad; and if he did
not win her life would be more tormenting in its patent purposelessness
than even he, with his immense capacity for abstract rage, had ever
known. And yet it was utterly beyond him to speak the necessary words.
And the army of winds passed down to the plains and there was stillness,
the trunks of the trees ceased to groan and the dead leaves did not race
among their feet, and she shook back her hair and was no longer a woman.
She leaned towards him and spoke rapidly, reverting to the subject of
women soldiers, and unquestionably the spirit of childhood lodged upon
her lips.

Granted that there was such a thing as future life, though, mind you,
she found the evidence in support of it miserably weak, did he not think
that the canonisation of Joan of Arc must have been a terrible smack in
the face for St. Paul? He made himself forget in laughter the priceless
moment that had passed, and he told himself, as sternly as once in South
America he had had to tell himself that he must stop drinking, that her
mother had been right, and he must not make l