Those men and women who jeer at first love have surely never felt its potent spell. Twelve years had gone by since Boringdon had dreamed the dream which had to a certain extent embittered and injured the whole of his youth. What a fool he had been! But, on the other hand, so he remembered now, how little he had thought--if indeed he had thought at all--as to any question connected with Arabella Berwick's fortune or lack of it! Miss Berwick had been mistress of her uncle's house, that Lord Bosworth who was a noted statesman as well as a man of rank: of course she must have money, so Boringdon in his young simplicity had thought, and certainly that belief had been no bar to what he had brought himself tremblingly to believe might come to pass. The beautiful girl, secure in her superior altitude of twenty-five years of life, and an already considerable knowledge of the world, had taken up the clever boy, her brother's Oxford friend, with pretty enthusiasm. She had liked him quite well enough to accept smilingly his adoration, to allow that he should amuse her (so he had realised ever since) in the intervals of a more serious love affair. Well, as he reminded himself to-night, they had been quits! Small wonder indeed that even now, after twelve years had gone by, the recollection of certain bitter moments caused Boringdon to quicken his footsteps! To-night it all came back to him, in a flood of intolerable memories. It had been late in the season, on the eve--or so he had thought--of his dream's fruition, during the last days of his first spring and summer in London after he had gone down from Oxford. Some merciful angel or some malicious devil--he had never quite known which--had caused him, one Sunday afternoon, while actually on the way to Bosworth House, to turn into Kensington Gardens. There, in a lonely grassy by-way among the trees, where he had turned aside to think in solitude of his beautiful lady, he had suddenly come on her face to face,--on Arabella Berwick, on his goddess, on the woman whose every glance and careless word had been weighed by him with anxious thought,--finding her in such a guise that for a moment he had believed that his mind, his eyes, were playing him some evil trick. Miss Berwick, her eyes streaming with tears, was clinging to a man's arm; and, what made the scene the more unreal, the more incredible, to the amazed onlooker, Boringdon knew the man quite well, and had often, in his young importance, looked down on him as being so much less intimate at Bosworth House than he was himself. The man into whose plain, powerful face Arabella Berwick was gazing with such agonised intensity was Daniel O'Flaherty, an Irish barrister, but lately come to practise at the English Bar, a Paddy whose brogue--so Berwick had assured his friend Boringdon--you could cut with a knife, but who was, he had added good-naturedly, said by many people to be a clever fellow!