Of man—­at any age from five years on—­who can say he has never been in love?  Ashurst had loved his partners at his dancing class; loved his nursery governess; girls in school-holidays; perhaps never been quite out of love, cherishing always some more or less remote admiration.  But this was different, not remote at all.  Quite a new sensation; terribly delightful, bringing a sense of completed manhood.  To be holding in his fingers such a wild flower, to be able to put it to his lips, and feel it tremble with delight against them!  What intoxication, and—­embarrassment!  What to do with it—­how meet her next time?  His first caress had been cool, pitiful; but the next could not be, now that, by her burning little kiss on his hand, by her pressure of it to her heart, he knew that she loved him.  Some natures are coarsened by love bestowed on them; others, like Ashurst’s, are swayed and drawn, warmed and softened, almost exalted, by what they feel to be a sort of miracle.

And up there among the tors he was racked between the passionate desire to revel in this new sensation of spring fulfilled within him, and a vague but very real uneasiness.  At one moment he gave himself up completely to his pride at having captured this pretty, trustful, dewy-eyed thing!  At the next he thought with factitious solemnity:  ’Yes, my boy!  But look out what you’re doing!  You know what comes of it!’

Dusk dropped down without his noticing—­dusk on the carved, Assyrian-looking masses of the rocks.  And the voice of Nature said:  “This is a new world for you!” As when a man gets up at four o’clock and goes out into a summer morning, and beasts, birds, trees stare at him and he feels as if all had been made new.

He stayed up there for hours, till it grew cold, then groped his way down the stones and heather roots to the road, back into the lane, and came again past the wild meadow to the orchard.  There he struck a match and looked at his watch.  Nearly twelve!  It was black and unstirring in there now, very different from the lingering, bird-befriended brightness of six hours ago!  And suddenly he saw this idyll of his with the eyes of the outer world—­had mental vision of Mrs. Narracombe’s snake-like neck turned, her quick dark glance taking it all in, her shrewd face hardening; saw the gipsy-like cousins coarsely mocking and distrustful; Joe stolid and furious; only the lame man, Jim, with the suffering eyes, seemed tolerable to his mind.  And the village pub!—­the gossiping matrons he passed on his walks; and then—­his own friends—­Robert Carton’s smile when he went off that morning ten days ago; so ironical and knowing!  Disgusting!  For a minute he literally hated this earthy, cynical world to which one belonged, willy-nilly.  The gate where he was leaning grew grey, a sort of shimmer passed be fore him and spread into the bluish darkness.  The moon!  He could just see it over the bank be hind; red, nearly round-a strange moon!  And