When had she begun to love him? she asked herself sometimes in a sad reverie. She had questioned him closely as to the growth of his love, but had been slow to make her own confession. How well she remembered his pale, tired face that winter night, just a year and a half ago, when he came into the lamp-lit room and took his seat on the opposite side of the hearth, a stranger and half an enemy. She had liked and admired him from the very first, knowing that he was prejudiced against her. The pale, clear-cut face, the grey eyes with their black lashes, which made them look black in some lights, hazel in others; the thoughtful mouth, and that all-pervading expression of melancholy which had at once enlisted her sympathy,--all these had pleased her. ‘I must have been dreadfully weak-minded,’ she said to herself, ‘for I really think I fell in love with him at first sight.’ That little wood behind the Manor House grounds was Laura’s favourite resort in this early summer-time. It was the most picturesque of woods, for the ground sloped steeply to a narrow river, on the further side of which there was a rugged bank, topped by a grove of fir trees. The stream ran brawling over a rocky bed; and the bold masses of rock, here shining purple or changeful grey, there green with moss; the fringe of ferns upon the river brink, the old half-ruined wooden bridge that spanned the torrent; the background of beech and oak, mingled with the darker foliage of old Scotch firs; and towering darkly above all, the lofty ridge of moorland, made a picture that Laura fondly loved. Here she came when the prim gardens of the Manor House seemed too small to hold her thoughts and cares. Here she seemed to breathe a freer air. She came to this spot one evening in June, after a day of sunny weather which had seemed longer and wearier and altogether harder to bear than the generality of her days. Celia had been with her all day, and Celia’s small-talk had been drearier than solitude. Laura was thankful to be alone in this quiet shelter, where the indefatigable labours of the woodpecker and the babble of the stream were the only sounds that stirred the summer silence. All day long the heat had been hardly endurable; now there was a breath of coolness in the air, and nothing left of that fierce sun but a soft yellow light in the western sky. Laura had a volume of Shelley in her pocket, taken up from among the books on the table in her favourite room. It was one of the books she loved best, and had been the companion of many a ramble. She seated herself on a fallen trunk of oak beside the river, and opened the volume haphazard at ‘Rosalind and Helen,’ and she read on till she came to those lovely lines which picture such a spot as that where she was sitting.