When she was alone her thoughts were all of him.  As she lay at night half-dreaming on his little camp-bed in his bare room she wondered what his life had been.  And, to a woman, the inevitable question arose in her mind:  Had he ever loved or was he now in love with someone?  It seemed to her that any woman should be proud to win the love of such a man.  Was there one?  What sort of girl would he admire, she wondered.  She had noticed that in their talks he had never mentioned any of her sex or given her a clue to his likes and dislikes.  She knew little of men.  Her brother was the only one of whose inner life and ideas she had any knowledge, and he was no help to her understanding of Dermot.

It never occurred to Noreen that there was anything unusual in her interest in this new friend, nor did she suspect that that interest was perilously akin to a deeper feeling.  All she knew was that she liked him and was content to be near him.  She had not reached the stage of being miserable out of his presence.  The dawn of a woman’s love is the happiest time in its story.  There is no certain realisation of the truth to startle, perhaps affright, her, no doubts to depress her, no jealous fears to torture her heart—­only a vague, delicious feeling of gladness, a pleasant rose-tinted glow to brighten life and warm her heart.  The fierce, devouring flames come later.

The first love of a young girl is passionless, pure; a fanciful, poetic devotion to an ideal; the worship of a deified, glorious being who does not, never could, exist.  Too often the realisation of the truth that the idol has feet of clay is enough to burst the iridescent glowing bubble.  Too seldom the love deepens, develops into the true and lasting devotion of the woman, clear-sighted enough to see the real man through the mists of illusion, but fondly wise enough to cherish him in spite of his faults, aye, even because of them, as a mother loves her deformed child for its very infirmity.

So to Noreen love had come—­as it should, as it must, to every daughter of Eve, for until it comes no one of them will ever be really content or feel that her life is complete, although when it does she will probably be unhappy.  For it will surely bring to her more grief than joy.  Life and Nature are harder to the woman than to the man.  But in those golden days in the mountains, Noreen Daleham was happy, happier far than she had ever been; albeit she did not realise that love was the magician that made her so.  She only felt that the world was a very delightful place and that the lonely outpost the most attractive spot in it.

Even when the day came to quit Ranga Duar she was not depressed.  For was not her friend—­so she named him now in her thoughts—­to bring her on his wonderful elephant through the leagues of enchanted forest to her home?  And had he not promised to come to it again very soon to visit—­not her, of course, but her brother?  So what cause was there for sadness?