If this silent
adoration flattered her for the moment, honesty played no little part in
its success--for though there had been lovers who looked deep into her
heart before, the majority carried but liabilities to her feet and,
laying them there, would gladly have exchanged them for her father's
cheques to salve their financial wounds. In Alban she had met for the
first time a natural English lad who had no secrets to hide from her.
"He will worship the ground upon which I walk," she had said in the mood
of sundry novelettes borrowed from her maid. And this, in truth, the lad
might very well have come to do.

But the weeks passed and Alban remained silent, and the declaration she
had desired at first as an amusement now became a vital necessity to her
fasting vanity. Believing that their surroundings at Hampstead, the
formality, the servants, the splendor of "Five Gables," forbade that
little comedy of love for which she hungered, she went off, in her
father's absence, to their cottage at Henley, and compelling Alban to
follow her, she played Phyllis to his Corydon with an ardor which could
not have been surpassed. Aping the schoolgirl, she would wear her hair
upon her shoulders, carry her gown shortened, and bare her sleeves to
the suns of June. The rose garden became the arbor of her delights. "You
shall love me," she said to herself--and in the determination a passion
wholly vain and not a little hazardous found its birth and prospered.

For hours together now, she would compel this unconscious slave to row
her in the silent reaches or to hide with her in backwaters to which the
mob rarely came. Deluding him by the promise that her father was
returning shortly from Paris and would come to Henley immediately upon
his arrival, she led Alban to forget the days of waiting, petted him as
though he had been her lover through the years, invited him a hundred
times a day to say, "I love you--you shall be my wife."

In his turn, he remained silent and amazed, tempted sorely by her
beauty, not understanding and yet desiring to understand why he could
not love her. True, indeed, that the image of another would intervene
sometimes--a little figure in rags, wan and pitiful and alone; but the
environment in which the vision of the past had moved, the slums, the
alleys, the mean streets, these would hedge the picture about and then
leave the dreamer averse and shuddering. Not there could liberty be
found again. The world must show