So now, still looking down at the trees and daffodils, he drew a long breath and tried to smile over what had been a trick of the imagination and to relegate Karen to the place of half-humorous dreams. He tried to think calmly of her. He visualized her in her oddity and child-likeness; seeing the flat blue bows of the concert; the old-fashioned gold locket of the tea; the sealskin cap of the station. But still, it was apparent, the infection of the season was working in him; for these trivial bits of her personality had become overwhelmingly sweet and wonderful. The essential Karen infused them. Her limpid grey eyes looked into his. She said, so ridiculously, so adorably: "My guardian likes best to be called von Marwitz by those who know her personally." She laughed, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth. From the place of dream and memory, the living longing for her actual self emerged indomitably. Gregory turned from the balcony and went inside. He was dazed. Her primroses stood about the room in the white and blue bowls. He wanted to kiss them. Controlling the impulse, which seemed to him almost insane, he looked at them instead and argued with himself. In love? But one didn't fall in love like that between shaving and breakfast. What possessed him was a transient form of _idée fixe_, and he had behaved very foolishly in playing fairy-godfather to a dear little girl. But at this relegating phrase his sense of humour rose to mock him. He could not relegate Karen Woodruff as a dear little girl. It was he who had behaved like a boy, while she had maintained the calm simplicities of the mature. He hadn't the faintest right to hope that she saw anything in his correspondence but what she had herself brought to it. Fear fell more strongly upon him. He sat down to his breakfast, his thoughts in inextricable confusion. And while he drank his coffee and glanced nervously down the columns of his newspaper, a hundred little filaments of memory ran back and linked the beginning to the present. It had not been so sudden. It had been there beside him, in him; and he had not seen it. The meeting of their eyes in the long, grave interchange at the concert had been full of presage. And why had he gone to tea at Mrs. Forrester's? And why, above all why, had he dreamed that dream? It was his real self who had felt no surprise when, at the edge of the forest, she had said: "And I love you." The words had been spoken in answer to his love. Gregory laid down his paper and stared before him. He was in love. Should he get over it? Did he want to get over it? Was it possible to get over it if he did want to? And, this was the culmination, would she have him? These questions drove him forth.