Hermione found no particular stimulant in his sorrows, but the "Cécile" acted very tonically. Up went nose and chin again. "Then drop personalities and go on with what you were saying about the way I spoiled it all. Your æsthetic revels ... and the tobacco and the rest..." "Well, then," continued Applebo, "I was so content with everything as it was that when you came and began to kill my little snipe, and spoil their music with a fusillade, and swamp the odours of resin and marsh with fumes of sulphur and saltpetre, and obscure the landscape with smoke and generally put things on the blink..." "That was easy for you..." The poet waved his hand. "I swallowed my little cud..." "What...! Excuse me... Pray go on..." "I was wild with indignation. Especially as I recognised you..." "You did...?" "I said, 'Here is that pampered beauty, Cécile Bell, not content with breaking up all the men who know her ... or ought to ... must come over here and kill these little birds and smell up the marsh...'" "Oh, come..." "Well ... that acrid powder, you know. Therefore, when I saw the keeper stalking you, I was tickled to death." "And you'd have let him run me in...?" "I felt like helping. But when he got nasty I sympathised with you. He was right. You were wrong all the way through..." "_Merci!_ And you?" "I was wrong, too. I should have let him take you to the superintendent. It would have done you good in so many different ways." "Why didn't you...?" Applebo gave her a quick look. "I couldn't," he said, and looked straight into her eyes. Hermione's heart gave a sudden, tremendous throb. In that quick little "psychological moment," which lasted only as long as it took their eyes to meet, wonderful changes were wrought. Or perhaps they were not changes, but only the crystallising of instincts and emotions some few thousands of years older than Hermione. At any rate, what scientists would call "empirical symptoms" were most pronounced. Every little dormant cell of the many millions which go to make a Hermione ... or any of the rest of us ... suddenly awoke and began to shout for something which was owed it, and for which it felt, for the first time, a strong and immediate need. This is a clumsy way of trying to express what sentimentalists call "love at first sight," which, when all is said, is really no more than the love of a pussywillow for the first promise of warmth to come, with no consideration of intervening frosts. For good or bad, that was what happened to Hermione, and all of the many queer, complex emotions found their resultant in a quick, primitive impulse of which the keynote was to make the man beside her say, with truth, that nothing really mattered but herself.