Upon your first visit to Morningtown it was easy to hold out against you, for you were such a distant, dignified admirer then. Your apparent diffidence, your natural reserve, seemed to give me a coquettish advantage over the situation, and I was not slow to avail myself of it. How was I to know there was such a mad lover lying concealed behind your classic pose? Thus it was that I compromised all the armies of my heart. Henceforth I marched madly, dizzily to my final surrender. I could not have saved myself if a thousand Bluechers had hurried to my defence. And there even came a time when I desired my own capitulation; a thing which, owing to some perversity of nature, I was unable to accomplish of my own will. But you will remember how that finally came about, and it might have come so much earlier if you had made your first visit with the same brigand determination as your second. And you brought Jack with you! How droll you two looked that day as you stood upon our narrow door-sill awaiting your welcome! There was no accent of paternity in your expression to justify poor little Jack's presence. The relationship between you seemed so ludicrously artificial,--as if you had somehow got an undeserved iota subscript to your callous, scholarly heart. The situation put you at such a humorous disadvantage, made you appear so at variance with your hard, uncharitable theories of life, and with your superlative dignity of mien, that the terror I had felt in anticipation of your visit vanished away. I think the awkward helplessness with which you seemed always to be trying to domesticate yourself to Jack appealed to my sense of humour so keenly that your romantic proportions were suddenly reduced. You were less formidable to deal with as a lover. That is how I came to consent to the walk we took in the forest. Ah me! I should have taken warning from your enigmatical silence. And indeed I did tremble with vivacity in my effort to break it. But you only looked mysteriously confident about something and kept your own counsel, giving me a nod or a quizzical smile now and then, as if what I was saying really had no bearing whatever upon the issue at hand.... Then suddenly the grey wood shadows fell about us. The world changed back a thousand ages and we were the only man and woman in it. I felt the sudden compulsion of your arms about me. And, Philip, I could have rested in them if I had not caught in your face the expression of a new, undisguised man; but the strange white intensity of it startled me so that I must have died or made my escape. Ah! you do not know how sincere was my flight from you the next moment. I knew that I should be captured at last; but after the divine madness I had seen in your eyes, I could not be _willing_. And when at last you overtook me under that old Merlin oak, you showed no mercy at all, my lord. You were not even sorry for me, and you did not understand as I lay with my face covered in terror