led to it,
lifted her mouth that looked so childish, and which he told himself
through the clamour of his pulses there would be no harm in kissing, as
though she were the child she looked. But it was not a child's kiss he
gave her; nor, as he could but feel, was it a child's return she
tendered.

"Phoebe ...!" he began; "Phoebe ...!" He never knew himself what he
was trying to say, whether it were protest or excuse or a mere stammer
of passion. She interrupted him with a low cry.

"Oh, Ishmael! it was always you--really, always you ... I didn't know.
It'll be always you...!"

CHAPTER XVIII

THE IMMORTAL MOMENT

That which Lenine had hoped for some twelve years, which the Parson and
Vassie had first feared and then laughed at, which Ishmael himself had
hardly thought of, and then merely to dismiss with a smile, had come to
pass--so simply, with such a logical though quiet following of effect on
various causes, that it was no wonder Ishmael felt enmeshed in the web
of something it was not worth fighting to cut away. At first, on the
heels of the miller's rejoicing and Phoebe's clinging content, he had
been overwhelmed by a dense cloud of depression--a sense as of being
caught in something soft and too sweet that would not let him go and
into which he sunk the more deeply for his instinctive protest. Also the
sheer impossibility of the thing affected him with a dream-like belief
that it could not really have happened, or that at least something must
occur to dissolve it. Yet nothing did, not even the Parson's
frankly-expressed dismay.

Ishmael was very young, and in no sense a man of the world, and when he
thought of what lay behind that kiss he had given Phoebe he felt her
innocence had a right to demand of him that at least he should not
retract what she had built upon it. Also, Penwith being a very narrow
and intimate track of land, the scandal for her if he had withdrawn and
let the miller blaze his version abroad would have never been lived
down. A country which is a blind-alley has the advantage of immunity
from tramps, but it has the disadvantages also of a place which cannot
be a highway to other places. Talk, interest, all the thoughts and
emotions of life, of necessity beat back on themselves instead of
passing on and dying, or being swamped in the affairs of the great
world. Phoebe, as the miller knew, was already the subject of censure
among the stiffer matrons, whose sons were wont to hang roun