She became inexpressibly dear to him during those meetings. Her timidity and innocence charmed him so completely that he preserved them longer than he had at first felt inclined to do. His vanity was tickled to think that though she was past thirty he was the first man who had kissed her. She was not bad-looking, either, with her straight black brows and huge eyes--in spite of toil she did not look her years, and during the weeks of his courtship she seemed to grow younger and prettier, she grew daintier. Yet she largely retained the qualities that had first attracted him, her admiration for him was unbounded and guilelessly expressed--she would listen in tender reverence to his yarns, and received his caresses with a humble gratitude that went straight to his heart. As for Caro, life was a rainbow dream. The hardships of the day were gladly lived through in expectation of the joys of the evening. She felt very few qualms of conscience, even when the barrier was past which she had thought impassable. Somehow love seemed to alter her whole point of view, or rather stripped her of one altogether--after all, her point of view had never been more than the acceptance of other people's. Besides, there were things in love that she had never guessed; nobody had ever done anything to make her realise that there was beauty in it--Rose's flirtations, her father's jealous passion had never suggested such a thing. But now her life was brimmed with beauty, unimaginable beauty that welled up into the commonest things and suffused them with light. Also, about it all was that surprising sense of naturalness; which almost always comes to women when they love for the first time, the feeling of "For this I was born." Sometimes she would have anxious moments, a strange sense of fear. "I'm a bad woman," she would repeat to herself, and she would dread the thought of her sister Tilly. But the terrors did not last, they were driven away by the remembrance of what her life had been before she met Joe--its drabness, its aimless toil, its lassitude, its humiliations. She would have been a fool to spurn her golden chance when it came. It had been her only chance; after all it was not as if she ever could have married. She had had to choose between the life she had led up to that August evening and the life she was leading now, and she could not regret her choice. She never asked Dansay to marry her. He had given her pretty clearly to understand that he was not a marrying man, and she was terrified of doing or saying anything that might turn him against her. One of the things about her that charmed him most was the absence of all demand upon him. She never asked for presents, and the few things he bought her stimulated both her humble gratitude and her alarm lest he should have spent too much money. One day he suggested that he should take her to Boarzell Fair. "Oh, Joe, would you really!" "Of course, if you can manage it without us being spotted."