Elspeth.... He loved her again as he sat there,
somewhat bowed together in the sunlight, Alexander's challenge upon
the floor by his foot. There came creeping to him an odd feeling of
long ago having loved her--long ago and more than once, many times
more than once. Name and place alone flickered. There might be
something in Old Steadfast's contention that one lived of old time and
all time, only there came breaking in dozing and absent-mindedness!
Elspeth--
He saw her standing by him, and it seemed as though she had a basket
on her arm, and she looked as she had looked that day of the
thunder-storm and the hour in the cave behind the veil of rain.
Without warning there welled into his mind broken lines from an old
tale in verse of which he was fond:
"Me dreamed al this night, pardie,
An elf-queen shall my leman be ...
An elf-queen wil I have, I-wis,
For in this world no woman is
Worthy to be my mate ...
Al other women I forsake
And to an elf-queen I me take
By dale and eke by down."
Syllable and tone died. With his hand he brushed from his eyes the
vision that he knew to be nothing but a heightened memory. Might,
indeed, all women be one woman, one woman be all women, all forms one
form, all times one time, like event fall softly, imperceptibly, upon
like event until there was thickness, until there was made a form of
all recurrent, contributory forms? Events, tendencies, lives--
unimaginable continuities! Repetitions and repetitions and
repetitions--and no one able to leave the trodden road that ever
returned upon itself--no one able to take one step from the circle
into a new dimension and thence see the form below.
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