Somehow Aubrey had never appeared as a perfectly distinct personality to Boodles. Her love was in a mist. He seemed to have come into her life in a god-like sort of way, to have dropped upon her as a child like rain from the clouds, saying: "You thought of me, and I have come." While she went on thinking of him he would remain, but directly she ceased to think he would vanish again. They had simply come together as children and walked about; and now they were grown up children still walking about; and they felt they would like to grow up a little more, then stop growing, but still go on walking about. First love is a marvellous dose of fern-seed. They were content to look at one another, and while two young people remain in that state the gods can give them nothing. But Boodles was going on with her song: "You are going away, Aubrey. You are going away." There was a gate at the end of the wood, and it was something more than the gate of the wood. It opened only one way. Aubrey loved the little girl. He was steadier than most young men and less fickle than most. Even when he was away from Boodles he did not forget her, and when they were together she absorbed him. She was so fresh. He had never met any girl with a tithe of her wonderful spring-like freshness, which suggested the sweet earth covered with flowers and steaming after a shower of warm rain. Boodles seemed to him to be composed of this warm earth, sunshine and rain, with the beauty and sweetness of the flowers added. She had taken him when young, and planted him in her warm little heart, and tended him so carefully that he could not help growing there; and he could not be torn up, for that would have lacerated the heart; the roots were down so deep; and he might not bear transplanting. First love thinks such things, and it is good for the lovers. Life gives them nothing else to equal it.