He came a few steps back into the room....
It was those few steps which lost him to her, for they brought him within sight of Boarzell—framed in the window, where Castweasel woods had been. It lay in a great hush, a great solitude, a quiet beast of power and mystery. It seemed to call to him through the twilight like a love forsaken. There it lay, Boarzell—strong, beautiful, desired, untamed, still his hope, still his battle. And Alice?... He gave her a look, and left her.
"I once töald a boy of mine," he said to himself as he crossed the Moor, "that the sooner he found he could do wudout love the better.... Well, I reckon I'm not going to be any weaker than my words."
BOOK V ALMOST UNDER
§ 1.
Reuben did not go back to Cheat Land for several weeks. Those five minutes had been too much for him. He would never again risk putting himself in the power of things he did not understand. Besides, he felt vaguely that after what had happened Alice would not want to see him. She had humiliated herself, or rather he had humiliated her—for she had put out in one swift dark minute all the powers of her nature to bind him, and she had failed. He remembered her voice when she whispered, "But not too late," and her eyes afterwards, smouldering in shadow, and her little hands held out to him.... There had been nothing definite, obvious, or masterful, yet in those few words and actions her whole self had pleaded on its knees—and he had turned away.
But sometimes what kept him from her more than the thought of her humiliation was the thought of his own. For sometimes it seemed almost as if she had humbled him more than he had humbled her. He could not tell whether this sick feeling of shame which occasionally swamped him was due to the fact that he had so nearly surrendered to her or to the fact that he had not quite done so. Sometimes he thought it was the latter. The whole thing was ridiculous and perplexing, a lesson to him not to adventure into subtleties but to keep in communion with the broad plain things of earth.