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 down on the bole of a beech-tree, and young Morland stood looking at her.  Why should one face and not an other, this voice and not that, make a heart beat; why should a touch from one hand awaken rapture, and a touch from another awaken nothing?  He knelt down and pressed his lips to her foot.  Her eyes grew very bright; but she got up and ran on—­she had not expected him to kiss her foot.  She heard him hurrying after her, and stopped, leaning against a birch trunk.  He rushed to her, and, without a word spoken, his lips were on her lips.  The moment in life, which no words can render, had come for them.  They had found their enchanted spot, and they moved no further, but sat with their arms round each other, while the happy Being of the wood watched.  A marvellous speeder-up of Love is War.  What might have taken six months, was thus accomplished in three weeks.

A short hour passed, then Noel said: 

“I must tell Daddy, Cyril.  I meant to tell him something this morning, only I thought I’d better wait, in case you didn’t.”

Morland answered:  “Oh, Noel!” It was the staple of his conversation while they sat there.

Again a short hour passed, and Morland said: