unsteady as a boy's in his first
passion. "You won't fail me?"

"Oh never! never!"

"You have the most beautiful eyes in the world. I believe one
reason why I always secretly liked Val was that his eyes reminded
me of yours. I can't stand it when he looks at me under your
eyelashes. I always want to say 'Here take it Val.'"

"Take what?"

"Anything he wants. I'm going to extend a protecting wing over
my young brother-in-law. He shall not, no, I swear he shall not
come to grief. I can't stand it, he's too like you. When did you
first fall in love with me?"

"When did you?"

"The night you went to sleep in the garden at Wanhope."

"Oh! when you kissed me?"

"When I--?"

Isabel was speechless.

"How do you know I kissed you, Isabel? I thought you were
asleep."

"So I was," said Isabel, blushing deeply. "Oh! Captain Hyde, I
wasn't pretending! But I woke up directly after, and heard a
rustling in the wood, and I--I knew, don't ask me: I could feel
-"

"This?"

"Yes," Isabel murmured, resigning herself.

"How strange!" said Lawrence under his breath. "You were asleep
and you felt me kiss you?"

She looked up at him through her eyelashes. "Is that so strange?"

"Rather: because I never did kiss you."

"Not?"

"No: I bent over you to do it, but you were so defenceless and so
young, I didn't dare.-- Isabel! my darling! what have I done?"

The first days of love are supposed to be blind days, but too
often they are days of overstrained criticism, when from very
fear each sees slips and imperfections even where they do not
exist. The discovery that she had misjudged Hyde was an
exquisite joy to Isabel. This trivial, crucial scruple, of
morality or taste, whichever one liked to call it, was the sign
of a chastity of mind which could coexist, it seemed, with the
coarse and careless sins that he had never denied. After all no
marriage on earth is perfect, and husbands as well as wives have
to make allowances; but as years go on, and affection does its
daily work, the rubs are less and less felt, till the time comes
when deeper wisdom can look back smiling on the fears of youth.
Isabel at nineteen did not possess this wisdom but she had youth
itself.

The flames crackled low on the hearth: the wind, a small autumn
wind, piped weakly round white wall and high chimneypot: outside
in the garden late roses were shedding their petals loosened by a
touch of frost in the night. "Tears because you