When she was younger, Bell, indeed, had listened with great complacency to these “pieces,” as proving how clever the child was; but from that time to this, when she suddenly found that Rob Glen knew them too, and would say half, asking if she remembered the next--most delightful of suggestions--she had found nobody who cared, nobody who would listen and respond. Margaret’s eyes grew brighter and brighter, the ready flush of feeling went and came over her face like the flying shadows on a sunshiny landscape, as quick as those shadows fly upon the hills; and a soft excitement got possession of her. She talked as she had never talked in her life before, and impressed him as he impressed her by that easy poetry of youth which can look almost like genius in its early outpouring. A mutual admiration, a mutual interest, thus sprang up between them: and how much your admiration of the superiority of another is increased by the certainty that the other shows his superiority by admiring you, who can doubt? Rob, too, felt all this. He was dazzled himself by the pretty, simple strains of thinking and feeling which Margaret showed unawares, and he dazzled her (wittingly and of purpose) by his own eloquence, his theories, his deep thoughts, his lofty fancies. How delightful it all was, and how the hours of wetness out-of-doors, of slow-falling rain, and heavy clouds, and drippings and patterings and overflowings, tedious to everybody else, flew over the two young people in the little panelled room!