He was nothing of a mystic, and therefore had his own ideas of what seemed to afford his master so much satisfaction; he was enough of a poet to be sure that Senhouse's romantic raptures were only a makeshift at best. To his mind here was a man aching for a woman. He thought that the poet sang to ease his bleeding heart. He came to picture the mating of these two--Sanchia the salient, beautiful woman, and his master of the clear, long-enduring, searching eyes, and that strange look of second-sight upon him which those only have who live apart from men, under the sky. It is a look you can never mistake. Sailors have it, and shepherds, and dwellers in the desert. The eye sees through you--into you, and beyond you. It is almost impossible for any person to be either so arresting in himself or possessed of such utterance as will cause the weathered eye to check its scanning of distance and concentrate upon an immediate presence. To such an eye, communing with infinite and eternal things, no creature of time and space can interpose solidly. Each must be vain and clear as bubbles of air. Behind it float spirits invisible to other men--essential forms, of whose company the seer into distance really is. He will neither heed you nor hear you; his conversation is other-where. And what then would Senhouse do confronted with Sanchia? Would he look beyond her, towards some horizon where she could never stand? Or would he not see in her blue eyes the goal of all his searching--the content of his own? What would he say but “You!” and take her? What she but sigh her content to be taken? Appeasement is holiness, says Senhouse. And what of their holy life thereafter, breast to breast, fronting the dawn? Glyde's heart, purged of his dishonesty, beat at the thought. He turned all his erotic over to the more generous emotion, and faced with glowing blood the picture of the woman he had coveted in the arms of the master he avowed. When February began to show a hint of spring, in pairing plovers and breaking eglantine, Senhouse, in a temporary dejection, ceased work upon his poem, and Glyde said that he must know the news. All through the winter they had had little communication with the world beyond their gates. A shepherd homing from the folds, a sodden tinker and his drab, whom he touchingly cherished, a party of rabbit-shooters beating the furze bushes, had been all their hold upon a life where men meet and hoodwink each other. Once in a week one of them ploughed through the drifts to the cottage at the foot of the third valley, and got as he needed flour and candles, soap or matches. It had not yet occurred to either of them--to Senhouse it never did occur--to beg the sight of a newspaper. But Saint Valentine's call stirred the deeps of Glyde, who now said that he must have news. He departed for Sarum, and stayed away until March was in.