While he dressed, he thought of the letter he had to write, and then of its consequences. How long would it be before he would have the right to come and say to Barbara, "I have begun the fortune you ordered. I am not rich yet, but I have fairly started on the road to riches and Mitchelhurst--will you wait for me there?" Or might he not say, "Will you travel the rest of the way with me?" How long must it be before he could say that? Two years? Surely in two years he might unclose his lips; for he would work--it would be no wearisome task. A longing, new and strange, to labour for his love flooded the inmost recesses of his soul. The man's whole nature was suddenly broken up, and flowing forth as a stream in a springtide thaw. It seemed to him that he could give himself utterly to the most distasteful occupations; in fact, that he would reject and scorn any remnant of himself that had not toiled for Barbara. The girl herself woke up, a room or two away, and lay with her eyes fixed on the tester of the great shadowy bed. It was early, she need not get up for a few minutes more. The pale autumn morning stole in between the faded curtains, and lighted her vivid little face, a little face which might have been framed in a couple of encircling hands. And yet, small as it was, where it rested, with a cloud of dusky hair tossed round it over the pillow, it was the centre and the soul of that melancholy high-walled room. She had dreamed confusedly of Reynold Harding, and hardly knew where her dream ended and her waking thought began--perhaps because there was not much more reality in the one than in the other. Girls have an ideal which they call First Love. It is rather a troublesome ideal, involving them in a thousand little perplexities, self-deceits, half-conscious falsehoods; but they adore it through them all. First Love is the treasure which must be given to the man they promise to marry; the bloom would be off the fruit, the dewdrop dried from the flower, if they could not assure him that the love they feel for him was the earliest that ever stirred within their hearts. The utmost fire of passion must have the freshness of shy spring blossoms. Love, in his supreme triumphant flight from soul to soul, must swear he never tried his wings before.