My father twinkles at me and says that although I have got in William I., and ’the strong love interest’ has turned up, William II. and the fauna of the South Pole have still to be inserted. I think it’s difficult to write of love, but Nannie says,— ’Oh, no. Just tell about the time you saw him first, and what he said to you, and you to him.’ But that first time, in church, he only looked at me, and the second time, out in the woods, I ran away! But two days after that, Aunt Constance had a dinner party, and the Foxhills came, and with them—Michael. I saw that same glow of adoration on his face, and I was afraid to let him see my eyes lest he should catch an answering look in them. After dinner I slipped away into the Great Hall alone. He followed me and said,— ’The garden is very sweet to-night, won’t you come out with me?’ It seemed as if he had the right to ask that I should go, and I the right to go since he had asked it. Out in the warm, sweet night he told me a little of his life in India—of the loneliness of his frontier station, but the splendour of it, too. I caught the lure and glamour of the mountains he loved to climb with two faithful guides who went out to him from Switzerland year after year whenever he had leave. I guessed a little of the strenuous simplicity of the life of this man whose face had ’fixed me.’ And then there came a little silence which he broke by telling me that once in a London church he had seen ’a girl’s face like a cameo, cut in the grayness of the wall behind.’ ’I loved you then,’ he said, ’I loved you in the woods that day—I love you now.’ And I? what did I do and say? Oh, what would any woman—out in the warm darkness with a man she’d hardly spoken to before? I chose to forget that moment in the woods when all my heart went out to him. I selected my words with daintiness and my sentences with care, and built up little barriers of aloofness all around me. I said that ’I must go in now, but that I had been so interested in all he’d told me of his life in India, that I would think of him sometimes climbing his mountains.’ And as I turned to go out of the garden I added airily, ’Write? Oh, yes, perhaps I might even write occasionally. I liked writing to my friends. When he came home again in three years’ time on leave we might even meet again. Perhaps—perhaps——’