t hearing the gradual diminuendo
of the noises of traffic outside, till, when she thought there would
be a hush, the crescendo of the work of the coming day began, she felt
no doubt as to what this was which absorbed her and kept sleep so far
aloof from her eyelids. It had started from as small a beginning as a
fire that devastates a city, reducing it to desolation and blackened
ash. A careless passenger has but thrown away the stump of a cigarette
or a match not entirely extinguished near some inflammable material,
and it is from no other cause than that that before long the walls of
the tallest buildings totter and sway and fall, and the night is
turned to a hell of burning flame. Not yet to her had come the
wholesale burning, there was not yet involved in it all her nature;
but something had caught fire at those few words of Lord Lindfield's;
the heat and fever had begun.

Well she knew what it was that ailed her. Hitherto love was a thing
that was a stranger to her, though she was no stranger to intense and
impulsive affection like that which she felt for Aunt Jeannie. But how
mysterious and unaccountable this was. It seemed to her that the
phenomenon known as "love at first sight," of which she had read, was
a thing far less to be wondered at. There a girl meets some one she
has not seen before whom she finds holds for her that potent spell.
That could be easily understood; the new force with which she comes in
contact instantly exercises its power on her. But she, Daisy, had come
across this man a hundred times, and now suddenly, without apparent
cause, she who thought she knew him so well, and could appraise and
weigh him and settle in her own mind, as she had done after her talk
to Lady Nottingham the afternoon before, whether she would speak a
word that for the rest of her life or his would make her fate and
destiny, and fashion the manner of her nights and days, found that in
a moment some change of vital import had come in turn on her, so that
she looked on him with eyes of other vision, and thought of him in
ways as yet undreamt of.

This was disquieting, unsettling; it was as if the house in which she
dwelt--her own mind and body--which she had thought so well-founded and
securely built--was suddenly shaken as by an earthquake shock, and she
realized with a touch of panic-fear that outside her, and yet knit into
her very soul, were forces unmanifested as yet which might prove to be
of dominant potency.