After that episode at the stile, which, as it happened, formed such a crisis in their destinies, Barbara Lexden and Frank Churchill did not move towards the house, but quietly turned into that fir plantation through which they had strolled some days previously on their return from the shooting party. At first neither spoke; Barbara walked with her eyes downcast, and Churchill strolled idly by her side; then, after a few paces, he took her unresisting hand and placed it in his arm. She looked, up into his face with calm, earnest, trustful eyes, and he bowed his head until, for the first time in his life, his lips touched hers, and as he withdrew them he murmured, "My darling! my own darling! thank God for this!" His arm stole round her waist, and for an instant he held her tightly clasped; then gently releasing her, he again passed her hand through his arm, covered it with his other hand, and walked on quietly by her side. There was no need of speech; it was all known, all settled, all arranged; that restored glove, that one fervent sentence, that one look in which each seemed to read the secrets of the other's soul, had done it all. This was first love, undisturbed by the fact that on either side there had probably been some half-dozen attacks of that spurious article, that saccharine bliss, that state of pleasant torture which reveals itself in sheep-like glances and deep-drawn sighs, in a tendency to wear tight boots and to increase the already over-swollen tailor's bill, to groan and be poetical, and to shrink from butchers' meat. Although the existent state of Barbara and Churchill had none of these characteristics, it was still first love.