For with Flossie it was spring-time too.  Under the little clerk’s correctness and demureness there ran and mingled with her blood the warm undercurrent of a dream.  The dream had come to her many springs ago; and as Flossie grew plumper and rosier it grew plump and rosy too.  To be married (to a person hitherto unspecified in fancy, whose features remained a blur or a blank), to be the mistress of a dear little house (the house stood out very clear in Flossie’s fancy), and the mother of a dear little girl (a figure ever present to her, complete in socks and shoes and all the delicious details of its dress).  Compared with that vision of Flossie’s, no dream was ever so soft, so rosy and so young.

And now in the Spring-time all her being moved softly under the current of the dream.  Flossie’s fancy did not associate it consciously with Keith Rickman (she would have blushed if the association had been made apparent to her); the Spring did that for her, mingling with her blood.

Meanwhile, as Flossie dreamed, the same hour every week-day morning Rickman was awakened by the same sounds, the click of the door-latch in the bedroom overhead and the patter of a girl’s feet on the stairs.  He knew it was Miss Flossie Walker going down to early breakfast.  And when he heard it, he turned in his bed on the side farthest from the window and sighed.  Such a deep unhappy sigh.

Lucia had delivered him from Lucia, but there were other troubles from which she could not save him.  Not, in the warm spring days, from the newly awakened trouble of his youth; not, in the sleepless summer nights, from the brief but recurrent tyranny of sense, and not from the incessant hunger of the heart.  Though it was she who had created that hunger in him, it was not (at five and twenty) to be satisfied by the mere image of her, however vividly present to him.  He was only five and twenty, and the spring had come with its piercing sweetness, its irresistible delicate lure, to the great stirring, melting, and unbinding of his manhood.  He could be faithful to Lucia for ever in his soul; but there were moments in this season when he was aware of a distinct cleavage between his soul and his senses.

It seemed to him that Miss Flossie Walker lay in wait for him in just those moments, with the secret but infallible instinct of the creatures whom the Spring touches to its own uses.  He could not blame her.  Flossie was innocent, being but the unconscious handmaid of the Spring.

It was not because Lucia was forever absent and Flossie forever on the spot.  At first he was unaware of the danger that lurked for him in Flossie’s ways, because his soul in its love for Lucia was so utterly secure.  At first the sighs were all on Flossie’s account; poor Flossie, who had to be up so early while he settled himself for another luxurious slumber.  At first he only pitied Flossie.  He thought of her at odd moments as a poor little girl (rather pretty) who worked too hard and never had any fun to speak of; but the rest of the time he never thought of her at all.