It was her first breath of romance. A father's ailments, encompassing her girlhood, had excluded sentimental episodes. To marriage she had been moved by nothing but docility. She would soon be thirty--and for the first time she found a strange pulsating promise in the birds' twittering when she woke; lingered at a looking-glass, and turned back to it, that a man might approve. She eyed intently time's touches on her face, noting with new sensitiveness that it showed her age. She knew, for the first time, restlessness if one man was absent; and if he was present, knew impatience of all others who were present too. And she sparkled at her own blitheness; and but for the recurring thought that it would all be over soon, she lived in Eden for a week. * * * * * They had been speaking of her stepdaughters, and he had said, "The first time I saw you with them I wondered what the relationship was. You can't have much in common with them? You must have hoped to see them marry, haven't you?" "Do you think they will?" she asked. "Oh, I don't know. It doesn't follow, because one finds no charm in a girl oneself, that nobody else will find any. I've known men crazy about women that I wouldn't have turned my head to look at--and men that were by no means fools. Isn't there anybody in Beckenhampton?" "There aren't many chances for a girl in Beckenhampton. Besides, they don't care for young men's society--that's one of the reasons why men don't find much to say to them, I think. I hoped something might come of their staying here, but----" "But a man has wanted to talk to _you_, instead." Could she control her voice? "Oh, that's a different thing." "Why is it a different thing?" "I meant that I hoped it might lead to something for them--I wasn't thinking of friendship." "_I'm_ not thinking of friendship; your friendship wouldn't be much use to me out there. I want you to be my wife. Will you?" They were in the garden, after dinner. From the ladies' orchestra in the hall came the barcarolle from _The Tales of Hoffmann_. In sentiment she was in her teens. "I can't," she said, in a whisper. "I'm so fond of you. Do you know I've never heard your name?" She told him her name. "Belle, I'd be so good to you. Don't you like me?" She turned to him. No one could see them. The first kiss of her first love--moonlight, and the barcarolle. Though she did not recognise it, there was a single instant in which she was capable of any weakness. But she was not capable of strength. "I can't," she repeated. "How can I? To marry again! I couldn't say such a thing to them. What would they--I couldn't do it." "I don't understand. You 'can't marry me' because they wouldn't like it? You don't mean that? Or is it because you don't think you ought to leave them?" "Both."