Her manners, her moods, her beauty had fascinated me. My love for her was become a passion. I determined before long to declare it. But before doing so, I resolved to see more of her. I wanted to be sure that she loved me before I proposed. I felt my happiness would be staked on the issue of the offer, and dreaded the result of hasty action. You may believe I thought very hard over the problem of her nature; but I could arrive at no solution that satisfied me. She had affirmed that she liked my company; but the assurance had been too much qualified by the _naïveté_ of the declaration to be pleasing. A better illustration, at least a more satisfactory indication, lay in her not avoiding me. But what an odd character was hers! How inadequate is language to represent her! I can only give you the bare uncoloured outline. It is beyond my power to fill it up with the details which must be accurately painted, before you can have before you, as I knew her, my beautiful, wayward, fantastical, child-like neighbour. I suppose my love blinded me, or I should have attached more importance to the various little perplexing points of character which stole out during our conversations. Her candour was made too piquant by her eyes, her downright utterances too musical by her voice, her rapid divergence from one topic to another too pretty by the infantine air that accompanied it, to suffer me to note any other meaning than that which met the eye and ear. I laid aside my books and my ambitions in my pursuit of her. Compared with winning her, all other pleasures and hopes were poor and small indeed. My love engrossed my thoughts, held me absent; and made me altogether more foolish than my sense of self-respect will suffer me to recall. She was right when she told me I should find a time to meet her. I met her the next day. I met her the day after; and upon succeeding days again. Once I prevailed upon her to accompany me in a walk to the cliffs, by an unfrequented road leading to a spot where we stood in little danger of being intruded on. It was on this occasion that I witnessed in her more constrained air, in her speech more suave than usual, in her eyes which were sometimes shyly averted, the presence of an emotion I had waited for and sought to excite. The breakers creamed at our feet; a west wind cooled the air; the white gulls swept by on curved and steady wings; the sun reared an unbroken silver pillar in the sea. The scene, the sounds, the solitude were propitious to love; but I would not speak my feelings yet. I felt that the memory of this calm and tender hour we were passing together would do more for me than I could do for myself.