"Hounds are hounds," I said slowly. "And the hound will chase his thousandth hare with all the unslaked eagerness that thrilled him when his first quarry fled before him."
"Why?"
But I shook my head in silence.
"Are you that way?"
"I have not been."
"The instinct then is not within you?"
"Yes, the instinct is.... But some hounds are trained to range only as far as their mistress, Old Dame Reason, permits. Others slip leash and take to the runways to range uncontrolled and mastered only by a dark and second self, urging them ever forward.... There are but two kinds of men, Lois—the self-disciplined, and the unbroken. But the raw nature of the two differed nothing at their birth."
She stood looking down at the distant cattle along the river for a while without speaking; then her hand, which hung beside her, sought mine and softly rested within my clasp.
"It is wonderful," she murmured, "that it has been God's pleasure I should come to you unblemished—after all that I have lived to learn and see. But more wonderful and blessed still it is to me to find you what you are amid this restless, lawless, ruthless world of soldiery—upright and pure in heart.... It seems almost, with us, as though our mothers had truly made of us two Hidden Children, white and mysterious within the enchanted husks, which only our own hands may strip from us, and reveal ourselves unsullied as God made us, each to the other—on our wedding morn."
I lifted her little hand and laid my lips to it, touching the ring. Then she bent timidly and kissed the rough gold circlet where my lips had rested. Somehow, a shaft of sunlight had penetrated the green roof above, and slanted across her hair, so that the lovely contour of her head was delicately edged with light.