Her former timidity was the _à priori_ proof of the strength of the feeling that followed, when the sensitiveness of fear gave way to confidence. Town loves are a thing of sorry account: the best of them are a mere preference of the one to the many; and he who is fortunate enough to outshine his rivals, may pride himself in the possession of some superior recommendations which have achieved a triumph. Were he to look better to it, he might detect something, too, in the force of resources. At best, a few hundred pounds will turn the scale; for he is by all that a better man; and the trained eye of town beauties has a strange responsive twinkle in the glare of the one thing needful. In the remote and beautiful parts of a romantic country, things are otherwise ordered: affection there, is as the mountain flower to the gallipot rose; and it is a mockery to tell us that the difference is only perceptible to those who are weak enough to be romantic. A doughty warrior would recognise and acknowledge the difference, and fight a great deal better too, after he had blubbered over a mountain or glen born love for a creature who would look upon him as the soul of the retreat, and hang on his breast in the outpourings of Nature's feelings. That young Whitecraigs appreciated the triumph he had secured, there can be no reason to doubt. He had been within the drying atmosphere of towns, and had sung and waltzed, probably, with a round hundred of creatures who understood the passion, much as Audrey understood poetry--deeming it honest enough, but yet a composition made up of the elements of side glances, arias, smorzando-sighs, and quadrilles. With Alice Scott on his bosom, the quiet glen as their retreat, the green umbrageous woods their defence, its birds as their musicians, and the wimpling Lyne as the speaking Naiad, he forgot, if he did not despise, the scenes he had left. She flew from him now no longer. The fowler had succeeded to captivate, not intentionally to kill.