He would win her fairly or not at all. So, though to glance into her empty white room set him trembling, though the touch of her hand set his pulses going, he never schemed to touch her, never made pretexts to go into her room. A stormed citadel was in his eyes a thing spoilt in the capturing. So he waited for the gates to open. The irony was that if he had listened to sex--who spoke to him with her deep beguiling voice, like a purple-robed Sibyl--if he had for once parted company with his exacting spiritual self, Hazel would have loved him. We cannot love that in which is nothing of ourselves, and there was no white fire of spiritual exaltation in Hazel. The nearest she approached to that was in her adoration of sensuous beauty, a green flame of passionless devotion to loveliness as seen in inanimate things. But that there should be anything between a man and a woman except an obvious affection, a fraternal sort of thing, or an uncomfortable excitement such as she felt with Reddin, was quite beyond her ideas. She did not know that there could be a fervour of mind for mind, a clasp more frantic than that of the arms, a continuous psychic state more passionate than the great moments of physical passion. If Edward had told her, she could not at this time have understood it. She would have gazed up at him trustingly out of her autumn-tinted eyes; she would have embodied all the spiritual glories of which he dreamed; and she would have understood nothing. Once he tried to share with her a passage in Drummond's 'Natural Law in the Spiritual World.' He was reading it with young delight a good many years behind the times, for books had usually grown very out of date before they percolated through the country libraries to him. He had read it in his pleasant, half-educated voice, dramatically and tenderly; his cheeks had flushed; he had challenged her criticism with keen, attentive eyes. She had said: 'I wonder if that's our Foxy barking, or a strange 'un?' Hazel looked long from her window that night. 'Oh, I canna go! I canna go! Ed'ard setting store by me and all!' she said. 'Maybe the other signs wunna come.' * * * * *