Others
would--others had.
"Thy face drinketh the light,"--he had written that of her--and now she
knew that he had believed it. Had Nevile felt these things? Could Nevile--
as she knew him? Her lip curved back. If she could not think of herself
without thinking of Nevile--who wanted to mangle her--better take the
veil.
But she felt the strange reality behind that wild and adoring passion of
Jack Senhouse's, which had made him so incalculable a mixture. He advised
her, and adored, he received her confidences, and emptied verses out of
his heart into her lap. And she had had nothing to give him, who had given
her all! All indeed; for now she saw that he had loved her beyond measure,
reason, or stint.
There had been that last of his letters--a despairing cry from
Chanctonbury, written when she was Nevile's shadow, and he hers. She felt
stabbed to the heart to remember how perfunctorily she had read that. How
did it go? What had he said? She could not recall the words, but their
sense beat upon her. Oh, he had set her too high! He had called her
Artemis--the chaste, the bright. Artemis the Bright had been one of his
names for her--and Queen Mab another. He had set her too high! And how far
had she fallen? She bowed her burning head, and even as she did so,
remembered another phrase of his, sent with flowers--a line from the
Anthology, begging her to grant his rose "the grace of a fair breast.
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