For out of his thoughts about Annaik and Ynys arose a fuller, a deeper conception of womanhood. How well he remembered a legend that Ynys had once told him: a legend of a fair spirit which goes to and fro upon the world, the Weaver of Tears. He loves the pathways of sorrow. His voice is low and sweet, with a sound like the bubbling of waters in that fount whence the rainbows rise. His eyes are in quiet places, and in the dumb pain of animals as in the agony of the human brain: but most he is found, oftenest are the dewy traces of his feet, in the heart of woman. Tears, tears: they are not the saltest tears which are on the lids of those who weep. Fierce tears there are, hot founts of pain in the mind of many a man, that are never shed, but slowly crystallise in furrows on brow and face, and in deep weariness in the eyes: fierce tears, unquenchable, in the heart of many a woman, whose brave eyes look fearlessly at life, whose dauntless courage goes forth daily to die but never to be vanquished. In truth the Weaver of Tears abides in the heart of woman. O Mother of Pity, of Love, of deep Compassion: with thee it is to yearn for ever for the ideal human, to bring the spiritual love into fashion with human desire, endlessly to strive, endlessly to fail, always to hope in spite of disillusion, to love unswervingly against all baffling and misunderstanding, and even forgetfulness! O Woman, whose eyes are always stretched out to her erring children, whose heart is big enough to cover all the little children in the world, and suffer with their sufferings, and joy with their joys: Woman, whose other divine names are Strength and Patience, who is no girl, no virgin, because she has drunk too deeply of the fount of Life to be very young or very joyful. Upon her lips is the shadowy kiss of death: in her eyes is the shadow of birth. She is the veiled interpreter of the two mysteries. Yet what joyousness like hers, when she wills: because of her unwavering hope, her inexhaustible fount of love? So it was that just as Alan had long recognised as a deep truth, how the spiritual nature of man has been revealed to humanity in many divine incarnations, so he had come to believe that the spiritual nature of woman has been revealed in the many Marys, sisters of the Beloved, who have had the keys of the soul and the heart in their unconscious keeping. In this exquisite truth he knew a fresh and vivid hope.... A Woman-Saviour, who would come near to all of us, because in her heart would be the blind tears of the child, the bitter tears of the man, and the patient tears of the woman: who would be the Compassionate One, with no end or aim but compassion--with no doctrine to teach, no way to show, but only deep, wonderful, beautiful, inalienable, unquenchable compassion.