To be sure, she had fallen in love with everyone whom she had met. This habit dated from her twelfth, nay, from her tenth year. But this time it was different, oh, so different. This time it was like an axe-blow from which one doesn't arise. Or like the fell disease--consumption--which had dragged her mother to the grave. She herself was more like her father, thick-set and sturdy. She had also inherited his calculating and planning nature. With tough tenacity he could sacrifice years of earning and saving and planning to acquire farms and meadows and orchards. Thus the girl could meditate and plan her fate which, until yesterday, had been fluid as water but which to-day lay definitely anchored in the soul of a stranger lad. Her education had been narrow. She knew the little that an old governess and a comfortable pastor could teach. But she read whatever she could get hold of--from the tattered "pony" to Homer which a boy friend had loaned her, to the most horrible penny-dreadfuls which were her father's delight in his rare hours of leisure. And she assimilated what she read and adapted it to her own fate. Thus her imagination was familiar with happiness, with delusion, with crime.... She knew that she was beautiful. If the humility of her play-fellows had not assured her of this fact, she would have been enlightened by the long glances and jesting admiration of her father's guests. Her father was strict. He interfered with ferocity if a traveller jested with her too intimately. Nevertheless he liked to have her come into the inn proper and slip, smiling and curtsying, past the wealthier guests. It was not unprofitable. Upon his short, fleshy bow-legs, with his suspiciously calculating blink, with his avarice and his sharp tongue, he stood between her and the world, permitting only so much of it to approach her as seemed, at a given moment, harmless and useful. His attitude was fatal to any free communication with her beloved. He opened and read every letter that she had ever received. Had she ventured to call for one at the post-office, the information would have reached him that very day. The problem was how to deceive him without placing herself at the mercy of some friend. She sat down in the arbour from which, past the trees of the orchard and the neighbouring river, one had a view of the Russian forests, and put the problem to her seventeen-year old brain. And while the summer wind played with the green fruit on the boughs and the white herons spread their gleaming wings over the river, she thought out a plan--the first of many by which she meant to rivet her beloved for life. On the same afternoon she asked her father's permission to invite the daughter of the county-physician to visit her. "Didn't know you were such great friends," he said, surprised. "Oh, but we are," she pretended to be a little hurt. "We were received into the Church at the same time."