Yet at times, despite his caution, at the higher tides of his delight, he would laugh up in the face of heaven, not arrogantly, but with the overrunning sense of his content. A woman's lips had breathed their ephphatha upon his eyelids, and he looked out upon a new world. New, since her beauty, like a crystal spar, lent a rainbow border to all things beyond it. His life seemed lifted by a spread of wings at every touch of her fingers. There was a magic in her influence, that fed from the soft reluctance of her body the fuel that burned in his. A magic on which he lived between their meetings, and for whose strange infusion he fainted while they were apart. He told her, laughing, that he was almost frightened to be such a slave; and though she paid no heed to the assertion, it sank with melting heat into her heart, and unknown to him the girl's breast throbbed, behind its shy demurs, with a fierce exultation in the sense that swayed him. So two months passed, the two months when even the English earth seems mad, mad with the surge of its triumphant greenness, and with the singing flood of birds that fills it from the south. From the south, too, came, in May, the other woman, giving Terence notice of her return, and telling him that she only wished to see him if he felt a meeting was not impossible. He replied that nothing could make it impossible but his ignorance of her address, which she had omitted to send him. He called the day after it arrived. He had no avidity for the interview; but, seeing that he would be certain some day to meet her, thought the sooner the safer. She received him with a curious prescribed coldness, warmed in the strangest way by glances of reproachful pity. She spoke in a compressed tone, and Terence expected that at any moment she would scream and seize him. The prevision was so strong that, on leaving her, he practically backed to the door, keeping his eye deterrently fixed upon her, as though she were some savage creature that might spring upon him if he turned his head. She took the line throughout that, despite his perfidy, he was to be regarded with a grieved compassion; and she met his profession of attachment to the woman he was about to marry with the sad smile of a lenient unbelief. Once or twice the raging bitterness of a soul pent up behind it threatened to engulf the passive monotony of her speech, and the dull eyes glowed as though about to scorch him; but nothing deplorable happened, and Terence breathed a deep relief as the door closed behind him and shut off, as he trusted, from his future the only danger that threatened it. His confidence, however, did not live for long. Scarcely more than a week later something serious in Miss Anstruther's face checked him as he greeted her. "Yes," she answered to his eyes, "there's something I want to ask you. Is it true, as you told me, that you had never loved any one before you met me?" "Yes," he said.