fallen in love, though several times in his life he had tried hard to do so.  He had long wished to marry—­wished ardently; he had even got into the way of regarding every woman he met—­and he met many—­in the light of a possible partner.  ’Can it be she? he had asked himself a thousand times, and then answered half sadly, ‘No.’  Not one woman had touched his imagination, coincided with his dream.  It is strange that after seeing Eva Brunt he forgot thus to interrogate himself.  For a fortnight, while he went his ways as usual, her image occupied his heart, throwing that once orderly chamber into the wildest confusion; and he let it remain, dimly aware of some delicious danger.  He inspected the image every night before he slept, and every morning when he awoke, and made no effort to define its distracting charm; he knew only that Eva Brunt was absolutely and in every detail unlike all other women.  On the second Sunday he murmured during the sermon:  ’But I only saw her for a minute.’  A few days afterwards he took the tram to Hanbridge.

‘Uncle,’ he said, ’how should you like me to come and live here with you?  I’ve been thinking things out a bit, and I thought perhaps you’d like it.  I expect you must feel rather lonely now.’

The neat, fragrant shop was empty, and the two men stood behind the big glass-fronted case of Burroughs and Wellcome’s preparations.  Clive’s venerable uncle happened to be looking into a drawer marked ’Gentianae Rad.  Pulv.’  He closed the drawer with slow hesitation, and then, stroking his long white beard, replied in that deliberate voice which seemed always to tremble with religious fervour: 

’The hand of the Lord is in this thing, Clive.  I have wished that you might come to live here with me.  But I was afraid it would be too far from the works.’

‘Pooh! that’s nothing,’ said Clive.

As he lingered at the shop door for the Bursley car to pass the end of Machin Street, Eva Brunt went by.  He raised his hat with diffidence, and she smiled.  It was a marvellous chance.  His heart leapt into a throb which was half agony and half delight.

‘I am in love,’ he said gravely.

He had just discovered the fact, and the discovery filled him with exquisite apprehension.

If he had waited till the age of thirty-two for that springtime of the soul which we call love, Clive had not waited for nothing.  Eva was a woman to enravish the heart of a man whose imagination could pierce the agitating secrets immured in that calm and silent bosom.  Slender and scarcely tall, she belonged to the order of spare, slight-made women, who hide within their slim frames an endowment of profound passion far exceeding that of their more voluptuously-formed sisters, who never coarsen into stoutness, and who at forty are as disturbing as at twenty.  At this date Eva was twenty-six.  She had a rather small, white face, which was a mask to the casual observer, and the very mirror of her feelings to anyone with eyes to read its signs.