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swept reeds, he saw six young women dancing in a ring. Not to any music that he could hear did they move, nor was the rhythm of their movement either ordered or wild. It was not formal dancing, and it was not at all a Bacchic rout: rather they flitted hither and thither on the turf, now touching hands, now straining heads to one another, crossing, meeting, parting, winding about and about with the purposeless and untirable frivolity of moths. They seemed neither happy nor unhappy, they made no sound; it looked to the lad as if they had been so drifting from the beginning, and would so drift to the end of things temporal. **** “ . . . . then, circling round him, they swept him forward on the wind, past Silent Water, over the Edge, out on to the fells, on and on and on, and never stopped till they had reached Knapp Forest, that dreadful place. “There, in the hushed aisles and glades, they played with this new found creature—played with him, fought for him, and would have loved him if he had been minded for such adventuring. **** “Andrew King, like young Tamlane, might have sojourned with them for ever and a day but for one thing. He saw by chance a seventh maiden—a white-faced, woebegone, horror-struck Seventh Sister, blenched and frozen under a great beech. She may have been there throughout his commerce with the rest, or she may have been revealed to him in a flash then and there. So as it was, he saw her suddenly, and thereafter saw no other at all. She held his eyes waking; he left his playmates and went to her, where she crouched.” | |
| 41 | THE SIGNAL |
| 42 | BUTTERFLIES |
| 43 | HAULING TIMBER |
| 44 | THE REGENT’S CANAL |
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