tirely from a boy or flares up into a sudden vitality. Ishmael's blood
ran with too much of inherited aptitude for prayer for the former
pitfall to ensnare him, but the latter yawned beside him now and he
thrilled to its attractions. Sliding his stout, shiny shoe back and
forth with the stiff attempt at elegance so deprecated by Mr. Eliot, he
asked himself whether the Lord could really countenance such frivolity.
It was difficult to think of the things of the soul while so employed,
while on the moor, or by Bolowen Pool the thoughts came as naturally as
birds. Spring was in his blood and he called it faith, as later he would
call it love.

Spring was in the low-browed room at the "George," pouring in at the
long windows and spilling in pools of hazy yellow upon the polished
boards. Spring was in the old garden outside, touching the warm tangle
of gillyflowers to fire, transmuting the pallor of the narcissus to
light itself, making the very shadows more luminous than a winter's
shining. The freakish sun, lit this and left that, after its habit, for
nowhere is more mysterious alchemy than the mixing of sun and shadow in
the spaces of the air. Ishmael's keen eyes could see how a spider's
thread, woven from one tall plant to another, and wavering ever so
delicately in the faint breeze, was one moment lit here and there to a
line of pure light that merged into nothingness and gleamed out again,
while a moment later it might have vanished entirely or else shine its
length. The midges, dancing in mid-air, were living sun-motes for one
flash, then were swallowed up as suddenly as though they had slipped
through into the fourth dimension. A pair of white butterflies,
pearly-grey or golden as they fluttered in and out of those invisible
chambers of the air that held sun or shade, chased each other in futile
circles; the flower-heads nodded in and out of the brightness; and in
the room the white girls dipped into the Danaean showers and back
through the dimness, coloured like the butterflies by the swift
transitions, swaying like the blossoms. If not only the spacing of the
light but also the waves of movements could have flashed out visibly
like the spider's threads the garden and the room would have shown full
of the lovely curves.

And Ishmael felt the warm dazzle of the light and thought of the moor
and how in another half-hour or so the shadows would be long beside the
pool and the trout beginning to rise at their supper, an