often and often. He had rehearsed it in
his mind a thousand times, when the reins dropped on his horse's neck,
when he lay sleepless on the ground, even as he chatted to his mates. He
had planned what to say, how to say it, purposing to break down her
stubborn will with the passionate strength of his love for her, with mad
strong words, with subtle arguments. He had seen her hesitating in his
dreaming, had seen the flush come and go on her cheeks, her bosom heaving
beneath the black dress he knew so well. He had made good his wooing with
the tender violence that women forgive for love's sake, had caught her
and kissed her till her kisses answered and till she yielded him her
troth and pledged herself his wife. So he had dreamed in his folly. And
now he stood there like a whipped child, pleading huskily:

"Nellie!"

He had not known himself. He had not known her. Even now he hardly
understood that her glorious womanliness appealed to all that was highest
in him, that in her presence he desired to be a Man and so seemed to
himself weak and wicked. It was not her body only, it was her soul also
that he craved, that pure, clear soul of hers which shone in every tone
and every word and every look and every gesture. Beautiful she was,
strong and lithe and bearing her head up always as if in stern defiance;
beautiful in her cold virginity; beautiful in the latent passion that
slumbered lightly underneath the pale, proud face. But most beautiful of
all to him, most priceless, most longed for, was the personality in her,
the individuality which would have brought him to her were she the
opposite, physically, of all she was. He had wondered in reading
sometimes of the Buddhist thoughts if it were indeed that she was his
mate, that in re-incarnation after re-incarnation they had come together
and found in each other the completed self. And then he had wondered if
there were indeed in him such power and forcefulness as were in her and
if he were to her anything more than a rough, simple, ignorant bush
fellow, in whom she was interested a little for old acquaintance sake and
because of the common Cause they served. For to himself, he had been
still the same as before he ate from her hands the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge. Absorbed in his work, a zealot, a fanatic, conscious of all
she had and of all he lacked, he had not noticed how his own mind had
expanded, how broader ideas had come to him, how the confidence born of
persiste