"When you speak I believe all you say; other people would
listen to you also."
"I am not so sure of that," she said with a smile.
Then over the small face came the weary look it had worn last night as it
watched the shadow in the corner, Ah, so weary!
"I, Waldo, I?" she said. "I will do nothing good for myself, nothing for
the world, till some one wakes me. I am asleep, swathed, shut up in self;
till I have been delivered I will deliver no one."
He looked at her wondering, but she was not looking at him.
"To see the good and the beautiful," she said, "and to have no strength to
live it, is only to be Moses on the mountain of Nebo, with the land at your
feet and no power to enter. It would be better not to see it. Come," she
said, looking up into his face, and seeing its uncomprehending expression,
"let us go, it is getting late. Doss is anxious for his breakfast also,"
she added, wheeling round and calling to the dog, who was endeavouring to
unearth a mole, an occupation to which he had been zealously addicted from
the third month, but in which he had never on any single occasion proved
successful.
Waldo shouldered his bag, and Lyndall walked on before in silence, with the
dog close to her side. Perhaps she thought of the narrowness of the limits
within which a human soul may speak and be understood by its nearest of
mental kin, of how soon it reaches that solitary land of the individual
experience, in which no fellow footfall is ever heard.
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