The first and chief effect of Hilland's impetuous wooing was, as we have seen, to destroy her sense of maidenly security, and to bring her face to face with her destiny. Then his openly avowed siege speedily compelled her to withdraw her thoughts from man in the abstract to himself. She could not brush him aside by a quiet negative, as she had already done in the case of several others. Clinging to her old life, however, and fearing to embark on this unknown sea of new experiences, she hesitated, and would not commit herself until the force that impelled was greater than that which restrained. He at last had the tact to understand her and to recognize that he had spoken to a girl, indeed almost a child, and that he must wait for the woman to develop. Hopeful, almost confident, for success and prosperity had seemingly made a league with him in all things, he was content to wait. The major had sanctioned his addresses from the first, and he sought to attain his object by careful and skilful approaches. He had shown himself such an impetuous wooer that she might well doubt his persistence; now he would prove himself so patient and considerate that she could not doubt him. When they parted at the seaside Hilland was called to the far West by important business interests. In response to his earnest pleas, in which he movingly portrayed his loneliness in a rude mining village, she said he might write to her occasionally, and he had written so quietly and sensibly, so nearly as a friend might address a friend, that she felt there could be no harm in a correspondence of this character. During the winter season their letters had grown more frequent, and he with consummate skill had gradually tinged his words with a warmer hue. She smiled at his artifice. There was no longer any need of it, for by the wood fire, when all the house was still and wrapped in sleep, she had become fully revealed unto herself. She found that she had a woman's heart, and that she had given it irrevocably to Warren Hilland.