The girl could not help experiencing a feeling of infinite relief at the thought of being freed from her uncongenial work in the dressmaker’s establishment. Her pleasure, nevertheless, had been considerably marred, in the last few days, by the attitude of her sister towards the projected change.
And now, with the realisation of this thrilling new passion possessing her, her own feeling about leaving London was different from what it had been at first.
None of these questions interrupted, however, on that particular afternoon, the girl’s dreamy and absorbed happiness.
In the long delicious intervals that fell between her and her lover with a perfume sweeter than that of the arrested rain, she let her mind wander in languid retrospect, from that seat in Kensington Park, over every one of the wonderful events that had led her to this.
She recalled her first sight of Adrian and how it had come over her, like an intimation from some higher sphere of being, that her fate was henceforth to lie, for good and for evil, in that man’s hands.
It was quite early in April when she saw him; and she remembered, sitting now by his side, how, as each day grew milder, and the first exquisite tokens of Spring penetrated one by one—here a basket of daffodils, and there a spray of almond-blossom—into the street she traversed to her work, she felt less and less inclined to struggle against the deep delicious thrill that suffused itself, like a warm indrawing wave, through every pulse of her body. That it should never have come to her before—that she should have lived absolutely fancy-free until so near her twenty-third birthday—only made her abandonment to what she felt now the more sweet and entire.
“It is love,—it is love,” she thought; “and I will give myself up to it!”
And she had given herself up to it. It had penetrated her with an exultant inner spring of delight. She had immersed herself in it. She had gone through her tedious drudgery as if she were floating, languidly and at ease, on a softly rocking tide. She had lived entirely in the present. She had not made the least movement even to learn the name of the man whose wordless pursuit of her had stirred her senses to this exultant response.
She had felt an indescribable desire to prolong these hours of her first love, these hours so unreturning, so new and so sweet; a desire—she remembered it well now—that had a tinge of unformulated fear about it; as though the very naming, even to herself, of what she enjoyed, would draw down the jealousy of the invisible powers.