Then, with her dark head tilted back, she turned her face slowly towards him till it almost touched his lips. For an instant he hated her, fiercely, impotently. The next, he put his hand gently upon her shoulder and kissed her cheek. III That kiss dated naturally a new era in their relations; not outwardly at first, to an appreciable extent, but with a difference immense in implication, in understanding. Terence, forced to stay at Wallingford a day longer than he had intended, tried to put the added time to profit. He saw that the chief danger lay in the hazy country of her expectations. Her life had been turned upside down with joy, its dulness was on fire with an undreamed-of satisfaction; and she neither knew nor cared what might come next, so long as it kept the flame that was lit in her alive. She lived for the unexpected, and she would show no discrimination in accepting it. Everything in that land was so new to her that no one thing seemed more alien than another; nothing had a special air of peril or of safety, of warning or of promise: all things were equally and perturbingly improbable, and supreme. Terence realized how vague suddenly had become all her boundaries of conduct, and desired without delay to fix a frontier beyond which neither of them should go. He would withdraw from nothing that his kiss had even seemed to promise; but he wished to put what it had not inalterably beyond her reach. The optimism of such a hope can only be accounted for by his absolute ignorance of women; but her shyness, in a situation so strange to her, seemed to justify it while he remained at Wallingford. But later, as her letters began to multiply, he realized how profound was his mistake. She rode her fancy wherever it led her, and he might as well have tried to fix a frontier for the north wind. She wrote persistently of his love, of its greatness, its gladness, its splendid illumination of her life. Her exultation in a thing which had no real existence was terrible to Terence. Her dull unhappy being was transformed by a miracle as wonderful as that which creates the glory of painted wings from a withered chrysalis. And he had wrought it. He, by some ignorant magic, had set her life afloat on pinions frailer and more resplendent than a butterfly's, to touch which roughly was to destroy her. That was, of course, too brutal to be thought of. He must accept what he had done, however little he had meant to do it; must trust to time to dull its marvel and bring the woman back to earth. But there seemed little likelihood of that at first, and with the increasing rapture of her letters Terence grew ever more dismayed. Yet if he tried to lure her down to sanity, an agonized reply would be flung at him by the post's return, only to make his fears more vivid, and to compel from him, in sheer abasement, an expression of sentiment which he not only did not possess, but would have shrunk from possessing.