“Do you know, I can hardly realise when we are here--that this is New Zealand?” she said presently, “that only a little way back is the long road and the river and the ravine--the neighbour’s house and ours and the other houses between.... I will tell you the rest very quickly--and oh, let me tell you first, I am not afraid. In spite of all I know, I am not----” She was bending forward across the table. “... I was a woman when Paul came back from the distant city--and came first of all to me. He was changed--something excellent about his face and carriage, and something I did not understand at all, his face deeper lined, his voice lower, his words ready. I did not think about him when he was away. In the first evenings we passed together, I had only an old-time laugh for him. I kissed him with something like affection. We were permitted to be alone together, and I saw the old look upon my father’s face--that I had hated so. That look--even before the playmate thing had departed from me. Then I began to _see_ Paul--something I could not like nor understand, a readiness of words, and he was not wise enough to make them ring deeply. I seemed to be studying in him the novelty of a man--through the eyes of a girl. “One night we were together in my father’s house. It was our Spring and raining softly on the steps. The grass seemed full of odours, and the vines trembling with life. He kissed me there. It seemed that I hardly knew. I was looking over his shoulder into the dark, and I saw a little white face. It was like a rain-washed flower ... and to me it was quite everything. “... Everything that I had known and loved--compensation for all that I had missed and hungered for. Only the little face--but I knew the arms were held out to me. “Paul knew nothing of this. He was not to blame. It was not he, who carried me away. He was merely being the man he fancied--playing the thing as the world had taught him--showing himself fervent and a man. I could have laughed at his kisses.... I have nothing against him. It was his way.... But once he kissed me--and it came to me that he was the way--that he must join his call to mine.... I could do all but that--I need not love him. Can you understand--it seemed as if everything was done but that--that the little face had already chosen me.... I sent him away, and I remember long afterward I was standing on the porch alone. It rained.” Bellair realised now that she was watching him with something like anguish. A different picture of her came to him from that moment--filed for the long days apart--the rapt look of her mouth, and the pearl in her hair that brought out the lustre of whiteness from her skin--full-bosomed, but slender--slender hands that trembled and moved toward him as she spoke.... It was something for him--as if he had always been partly asleep before--as if she had brought some final arousing component to his being.