Beatrix didn't answer at once. "I suppose I'm frightened to let myself go," she said. "I did before, and it's as if something had got stopped up in me. I don't feel towards him as I did, and with _him_, though I admire and trust him a thousand times more. Will it come, Cara, dear? Can I go on, without doing him harm? He's so good and so fine, he _ought_ to have somebody who would simply worship him, and think of nobody else; not somebody who has already thought of somebody else, somebody not to be compared with him." Caroline wouldn't tell her that she thought it would all come. She knew it would, because now she saw that it was already there, though it was struggling for life through the dead waste of a once living but now withered love. "It's what you feel now, darling, that matters," she said. "I think something has been going on in you all the time that you can't recognise, because it's different from what it was." "Do you think that's it?" she asked rather pathetically. "I hope it is. It isn't that I want all _that_ to come back, though it did make me very happy while it lasted. But I don't want to disappoint him. I don't want to give him something, just because I feel like it for the moment, and then take it away again." "If you give him something because you feel like it--well, that's just what you'll be right in doing, darling. It wouldn't be right to hold it back. If you feel like it at any time, it shows it's there. I'm sure he's worth loving, B." "Oh, yes, he is. I think I do love him. I know I want him to come back to-morrow." Those were the words that rang in Caroline's ears when Beatrix had left her, comforted, and assured of her forgiveness for the horrid way in which she had behaved herself towards her. Poor little B! It would all have been so different if this had been the first time she had trodden the happy path of love. She was all softness and sweetness, made to capitulate to a strong man's wooing. But she had been bruised and torn, and there were sensitive places in her which shrank from the lightest touch. Her lover would not get the full response from her until he had taught her not to fear his touch on them. But she wanted him to come back. Her heart was fluttering out to meet him. Its wings would grow stronger. He came early the next morning. He had walked the three miles from Wilborough, where breakfast was earlier than at Abington, because any other mode of progression would have brought him there before it was convenient, and yet he wanted to be moving. Beatrix had gone down the ferny glade towards the gate in the wall that led into the park, not expecting to meet him so soon, but because she also felt it necessary to be in motion, and that was the way he would probably come.