Some time passed after this eventful evening before Kate had any opportunity of making the assault upon John’s principles which she proposed to herself. There were some days of tranquil peaceful country life, spent in doing nothing particular--in little walks taken under the mother’s eye--in an expedition to St Biddulph’s, the whole little party together, in which, though Dr Mitford took the office of cicerone for Kate’s benefit, there was more of John than of his father. This kind of intercourse which threw them continually together, yet never left them alone to undergo the temptation of saying too much, promoted the intimacy of the two young people in the most wonderful way. They were each other’s natural companions, each other’s most lively sympathisers. The father and the mother stood on a different altitude, were looked up to, respected perhaps, perhaps softly smiled at in the expression of their antiquated opinions; but the young man and the young woman were on the same level, and understood each other. As for poor John, he gave himself up absolutely to the spell. He had never been so long in the society of any young woman before; his imagination had not been frittered away by any preludes of fancy. He fell in love all at once, with all his heart and strength and mind. It was his first great emotion, and it took him not at the callow age, but when his mind (he thought) was matured, and his being had reached its full strength. He was in reality four-and-twenty, but he had felt fifty in the gravity of his thoughts; and, with all the force of his serious nature, he plunged into the extraordinary new life which opened like a garden of Paradise before him. It was all a blaze of light and splendour to his eyes. The world he had thought a sombre place enough before, full of painful demands upon his patience, his powers of self-renunciation, and capacity of self-control. But now all at once it had changed to Eden. And Kate, of whom he knew so little, was the cause.