But, to be honest, how often can a girl speak confidently of her first love? She reads poems and stories, and the young fellows who come about her, while she is yet in her teens, are hardly more than incarnate chapters of her novels. How did she begin? She loved Hector, it may be, and King Arthur, and Roland, and the Cid. Then perhaps she had a tender passion for Amyas Leigh, for the Heir of Redclyffe, or for Guy Livingstone; and the curate, or the squire's son, just home with his regiment from India, carries on the romance. This she assures herself is the mystic first love; but the curate goes to another parish, or the lieutenant's leave comes to an end, and the living novel is forgotten with the others. She will order more books from Mudie's and take an interest in them, and in the hero of some private theatricals at a country house close by. She will meet the young man who lives on the other side of the county, but who dances so perfectly and talks so well, at the bachelors' ball. She will think a while first of one, then of the other; and afterwards, when the time comes to make that assurance of first love, she will, half unconsciously efface all these memories, and vow, with innocent, smiling lips, that her very dreams have held no shape till then. Miss Strange was intent on the change in her little world of coloured shadows. Adrian Scarlett and Reynold Harding rose before her eyes as pictures, more life-like than she could find in her books, but pictures nevertheless, figures seen only in one aspect. Adrian, a facile, warmly-tinted sketch of a summer poet; Reynold, a sombre study in black and grey--what _could_ the little girl by any possibility know of these young men more than this? Reynold's romance, with its fuller development, its melancholy background, its hints of passion and effort, might well absorb the larger share of her thoughts. Her part was marked out in it; she was startled to see how a word of hers had awakened a dormant resolution. She was flattered, and, though she was frightened too, she felt that she could not draw back; she had inspired young Harding with ambition, and she must encourage him and believe in him in his coming fight with fortune. Barbara found herself the heroine of a drama, and for the sake of her new character she began to rearrange her first impressions of the hero, to dwell on the pathos of his story, to deepen the ditch into which he had slipped in her service, till it would hardly have known itself from a precipice, to soften the chilly repulsion which she had felt at their meeting into the simple effect of his proud reserve. She lay gazing upward, with a smile on her lips, picturing his final home-coming, grouping all the incidents of that triumphant day about the tall, dark figure with the Rothwell features, who was just the puppet of her pretty fancies. The vision of his future, expanding like a soap-bubble, rose from the dull earth, and caught the gay colours of Barbara's sunny hopes.