She was in bright spirits this morning, having discovered an object in life. The future has generally much more to do with our present moods than the past. Yet, notwithstanding this broad truth, the immediate past had a certain influence on Clytie's humour. Whilst she was driving home the afternoon before, the gravity of the fact of her confession to Kent had somewhat weighed upon her. She had spent the lonely evening grappling with a truth that had been taking half-reluctant shape in her consciousness for the last two months, and now rose clear and sharply defined. She had even written to Kent the following portion of a letter which she straightway tore up into the finest of pieces. In fact her intention of sending it to him was from the first of the very remotest. “My dear Kent,” ran this singularly feminine effusion. “My words to-day were true. If you had told me you loved me eighteen months ago, I should have realised myself and what it was that I felt towards you. The knowledge of her own heart does not come to a woman with the easy grace that your sentimentalists make out. It is somewhat of a fierce process, Kent. There is no royal road to it. Well, I know my own heart now, and I have bought the knowledge with agonies of suffering. Oh, Kent, my true, loyal Kent! I am tired, tired of hiding facts from myself, of acting in a wilful dream, in defiance of the promptings of my reason. I am a woman, and I ought not to confess things to myself, let alone to you. So people say--and people are so wise, aren't they? I love you, Kent. There, I write it down in black and white. It looks odd, grotesque, horrible, and yet wonderfully comforting. I love you, Kent. Why should I deceive myself any longer? God knows whether it is for my happiness in the future or my misery; but now that the beauty of it is upon me it makes me wonderfully happy. Yes, wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully happy.” And then she threw down her pen and shredded the paper with frenzied zeal. But her heart was lighter. The world seemed a clearer, pleasanter place. Her cheeks burned like fire at the thought of Kent ever knowing of this feeling. She arranged in her mind the tenderest and most elusive of relations between Kent and herself. He, a declared lover, should give her all the comfort and kind counsel of a friend; she, his declared friend, would find delicate, subtle ways of colouring and softening his life with her love. A new paradise of exquisite emotion opened its evanescent portals. For the first time in her life came the romance of delicate sentiment, tinged with an innocent pink like the buds in spring. It is true these same buds, to continue the analogy, burst into gorgeous, riotous bloom under the summer sun; but while the tenderer air of spring keeps them closed they have a grace peculiarly their own.