Was there some strange nonhuman eroticism, he wondered, in this contact between the heathen soil and that sleeping figure? He smiled to himself and then frowned uneasily. He began to feel obscurely piqued by the girl’s remoteness and inaccessibility. He felt as if he were actually looking on at some legendary encounter between the body of Gerda and the crafty superhuman desire of some earth-god. He began to feel an insidious jealousy of Poll’s Camp, an obstinate hostility to its mossy curves and grassy hollows.

“Very well!” he thought, in his fantastic irritation, as if he actually beheld his companion in the very arms of the hill-god. “If she draws away from me, I can draw away from her!” And his eyes, wandering to the roofs of the town, settled on that quarter where he knew the roof of the bookshop to be. He tightened his hold upon the two saplings; and inhaling deeply that hushed, warm air, he mentally swept off the roof of Christie’s house, and lifting the wraith-image of her high into the clouds⁠—he never visualized Christie’s actual appearance in any of these cerebral excursions⁠—he whirled her away with him towards that lonely cone-shaped hill, rising out of the plain, that he knew to be Glastonbury.