Keen enough in his perceptions, he was able to recognize that here was a
pure and imaginative spirit, strongly yearning after ideal strength,
beauty, and goodness. Given such a spirit, it was not unnatural that,
turning from sordid or unhappy surroundings as a flower turns from shadow
to the full face of the sun, she should have taken a memory of valiant
deeds, kind words, and a protecting arm, and have created out of these a
man after her own heart, endowing him with all heroic attributes; at one
and the same time sending him out into the world, a knight-errant without
fear and without reproach, and keeping him by her side--the side of a
child--in her own private wonderland. He saw that she had done this, and
he was ashamed. He did not tell her that that eleven-years-distant
fortnight was to him but a half-remembered incident of a crowded life, and
that to all intents and purposes she herself had been forgotten. For one
thing, it would have hurt her; for another, he saw no reason why he should
tell her. Upon occasion he could be as ruthless as a stone; if he were so
now he knew it not, but in deceiving her deceived himself. Man of a world
that was corrupt enough, he was of course quietly assured that he could
bend this woodland creature--half child, half dryad--to the form of his
bidding. To do so was in his power, but not his pleasure. He meant to
leave her as she was; to accept the adoration of the child, but to attempt
no awakening of the woman. The girl was of the mountains, and their
higher, colder, purer air; though he had brought her body thence, he would
not have her spirit leave the climbing earth, the dreamlike summits, for
the hot and dusty plain. The plain, God knew, had dwellers enough.
She was a thing of wild and sylvan grace, and there was fulfillment in a
dark beauty all her own of the promise she had given as a child. About her
was a pathos, too,--the pathos of the flower taken from its proper soil,
and drooping in earth which nourished it not. Haward, looking at her,
watching the sensitive, mobile lips, reading in the dark eyes, beneath the
felicity of the present, a hint and prophecy of woe, felt for her a pity
so real and great that for the moment his heart ached as for some sorrow
of his own. She was only a young girl, poor and helpless, born of poor
and helpless parents dead long ago. There was in her veins no gentle
blood; she had none of the world's goods; her gown was torn, her feet went
bare. She had youth, but not its heritage of gladness: beauty, but none to
see it; a nature that reached toward light and height, and for its home
the house which he had lately left. He was a man older by many years than
the girl beside him, knowing good and evil; by instinct preferring the
former, but at times stooping, open-eyed, to that degree of the latter
which a lax and gay world held to be not incompatible with a convention
somewhat misnamed "the honor of a gentleman." Now, beneath the beech-tree
in the forest which touched upon one side the glebe, upon the other his
own lands, he chose at this time the good; said to himself, and believed
the thing he said, that in word and in deed he would prove himself her
friend.