No other girl that ever was born could have aroused
such desire in him, and yet have slipped unscathed out of his arms at
the very moment when the consummation of his sin seemed unavoidable.
Any other girl must herself have been sacrificed in destroying him;
only the child who had frightened him in the wood could
instantaneously, by a few unconsidered words, have taken all the fire
out of him and changed his heart to a lump of ice. That was a stroke
of the Master: most Godlike in its care for the innocent and its
confusion of the guilty.
He remembered how grievously he had dreaded this child--the little
black-haired elf that had seen him hiding. It had made him shiver to
think of her--the small woodland demon, the devil's spy whose lisping
treble might be distinct and loud enough to utter his death sentence.
A thousand times he had wondered about her--thinking: "She is growing
up. She belongs here;" looking in the faces of cottagers' children and
asking himself: "Are you she? Or you? Or you?" Then he had left off
thinking about her.
She had come into his life again, into his very home, and he had never
once asked himself: "Is Norah she?" No, because God would not allow
him to do so; it had suited God's purpose to paralyze the outlet of
all natural thought in that direction.
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