mble towards him. A sweet warmth
overtook Ashurst from top to toe. This slim maiden, so simple and fine
and pretty, was pleased, then, at the touch of his lips! And, yielding
to a swift impulse, he put his arms round her, pressed her to him, and
kissed her forehead. Then he was frightened--she went so pale, closing
her eyes, so that the long, dark lashes lay on her pale cheeks; her
hands, too, lay inert at her sides. The touch of her breast sent a
shiver through him. "Megan!" he sighed out, and let her go. In the utter
silence a blackbird shouted. Then the girl seized his hand, put it to
her cheek, her heart, her lips, kissed it passionately, and fled away
among the mossy trunks of the apple trees, till they hid her from him.

Ashurst sat down on a twisted old tree growing almost along the ground,
and, all throbbing and bewildered, gazed vacantly at the blossom which
had crowned her hair--those pink buds with one white open apple
star. What had he done? How had he let himself be thus stampeded by
beauty--pity--or--just the spring! He felt curiously happy, all the
same; happy and triumphant, with shivers running through his limbs, and
a vague alarm. This was the beginning of--what? The midges bit him, the
dancing gnats tried to fly into his mouth, and all the spring around him
seemed to grow more lovely and alive; the songs of the cuckoos and the
blackbirds, the laughter of the yaflies, the level-slanting sunlight,
the apple blossom which had crowned her head! He got up from the old
trunk and strode out of the orchard, wanting space, an open sky, to get
on terms with these new sensations. He made for the moor, and from an
ash tree in the hedge a magpie flew out to herald him.

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