Green Fire. Sharp William

      To him, moreover, there was but one woman. In Ynys he had found her. This exquisite prototype was at once a child of nature, a beautiful pagan, a daughter of the sun; was at once this and a soul alive with the spiritual life, intent upon the deep meanings lurking everywhere, wrought to wonder even by the common habitudes of life, to mystery even by the familiar and the explicable. Indeed, the mysticism which was part of the spiritual inheritance come with her northern strain was one of the deep bonds which united them.

      What if both at times were wrought too deeply by this beautiful dream? What if the inner life triumphed now and then, and each forgot the deepest instinct of life, that here the body is overlord and the soul but a divine consort? There are three races of man. There is the myriad race which loses all, through (not bestiality, for the brute world is clean and sane) perverted animalism; and there is the myriad race which denounces humanity, and pins all its faith and joy to a life the very conditions of whose existence are incompatible with the law to which we are subject—the sole law, the law of Nature. Then there is that small untoward clan, which knows the divine call of the spirit through the brain, and the secret whisper of the soul in the heart, and forever perceives the veils of mystery and the rainbows of hope upon our human horizons; which hears and sees, and yet turns wisely, meanwhile, to the life of the green earth, of which we are part; to the common kindred of living things, with which we are at one—is content, in a word, to live, because of the dream that makes living so mysteriously sweet and poignant; and to dream, because of the commanding immediacy of life.

      As yet, of course, Alan and Ynys had known little of the vicissitudes of aroused life. What they did know, foresee, was due rather to the second-sight of the imagination than to the keen knowledge of experience.

      In Alan Ynys found all that her heart craved. She discovered this nearly too late. A year before this last home-coming of her cousin, she had been formally betrothed to Andrik de Morvan, the friend of her childhood and for whom she had a true affection, and in that betrothal had been quietly glad. When, one midwinter day, she and Alan walked through an upland wood and looked across the snowy pastures and the white slopes beyond, all aglow with sunlight, and then suddenly turned toward each other, and saw in the eyes of each a wonderful light, and the next moment were heart to heart, it was all a revelation.

      For long she did not realize what it meant. On that unforgettable day, when they had left the forest ridge and were near Kerival again, she had sat for a time on one of the rude cattle-gates which are frequent in these woodlands, while Alan had leant beside her, looking up with eyes too eloquent, and speaking of what he dreamed, with sweet stammering speech of new found love.

      How she had struggled, mentally, with her duty, as she conceived it, toward Andrik. She was betrothed to him; he loved her; she loved him too, although even already she realized that there is a love which is not only invincible and indestructible but that comes unsought, has no need for human conventions, is neither moral nor immoral but simply all-potent and thenceforth sovereign. To yield to that may be wrong; but, if so, it is wrong to yield to the call of hunger, the cry of thirst, the whisper of sleep, the breath of ill, the summons of death. It comes, and that is all. The green earth may be another Endymion, and may dream that the cold moonshine is all in all; but when the sun rises, and a new heat and glory and passion of life are come, then Endymion simply awakes.