Young Morland was a school and college friend of the two Pierson boys now at the front.  He had no home of his own, for his parents were dead; and this was not his first visit to Kestrel.  Arriving three weeks ago, for his final leave before he should go out, he had found a girl sitting in a little wagonette outside the station, and had known his fate at once.  But who knows when Noel fell in love?  She was—­one supposes—­just ready for that sensation.  For the last two years she had been at one of those high-class finishing establishments where, in spite of the healthy curriculum, perhaps because of it, there is ever an undercurrent of interest in the opposing sex; and not even the gravest efforts to eliminate instinct are quite successful.  The disappearance of every young male thing into the maw of the military machine put a premium on instinct.  The thoughts of Noel and her school companions were turned, perforce, to that which, in pre-war freedom of opportunity they could afford to regard as of secondary interest.  Love and Marriage and Motherhood, fixed as the lot of women by the countless ages, were threatened for these young creatures.  They not unnaturally pursued what they felt to be receding.

When young Morland showed, by following her about with his eyes, what was happening to him, Noel was pleased.  From being pleased, she became a little excited; from being excited she became dreamy.  Then, about a week before her father’s arrival, she secretly began to follow the young man about with her eyes; became capricious too, and a little cruel.  If there had been another young man to favour—­but there was not; and she favoured Uncle Bob’s red setter.  Cyril Morland grew desperate.  During those three days the demon her father dreaded certainly possessed her.  And then, one evening, while they walked back together from the hay-fields, she gave him a sidelong glance; and he gasped out:  “Oh!  Noel, what have I done?” She caught his hand, and gave it a quick squeeze.  What a change!  What blissful alteration ever since!

Through the wood young Morland mounted silently, screwing himself up to put things to the touch.  Noel too mounted silently, thinking:  ’I will kiss him if he kisses me!’ Eagerness, and a sort of languor, were running in her veins; she did not look at him from under her shady hat.  Sun light poured down through every chink in the foliage; made the greenness of the steep wood marvellously vivid and alive; flashed on beech leaves, ash leaves, birch leaves; fell on the ground in little runlets; painted bright patches on trunks and grass, the beech mast, the ferns; butterflies chased each other in that sunlight, and myriads of ants and gnats and flies seemed possessed by a frenzy of life.  The whole wood seemed possessed, as if the sunshine were a happy Being which had come to dwell therein.  At a half-way spot, where the trees opened and they could see, far below them, the gleam of the river, she sat