That kiss dated naturally a new era in their relations; not outwardly at first, to an appreciable extent, but with a difference immense in implication, in understanding.  
Terence, forced to stay at Wallingford a day longer than he had intended, tried to put the added time to profit.
 
He saw that the chief danger lay in the hazy country of her expectations.
 
Her life had been turned upside down with joy, its dulness was on fire with an undreamed-of satisfaction; and she neither knew nor cared what might come next, so long as it kept the flame that was lit in her alive.
 
She lived for the unexpected, and she would show no discrimination in accepting it. Everything in that land was so new to her that no one thing seemed more alien than another; nothing had a special air of peril or of safety, of warning or of promise: all things were equally and perturbingly improbable, and supreme.
 
Terence realized how vague suddenly had become all her boundaries of conduct, and desired without delay to fix a frontier beyond which neither of them should go.
 
He would withdraw from nothing that his kiss had even seemed to promise; but he wished to put what it had not inalterably beyond her reach.
 
The optimism of such a hope can only be accounted for by his absolute ignorance of women; but her shyness, in a situation so strange to her, seemed to justify it while he remained at Wallingford.
 
But later, as her letters began to multiply, he realized how profound was his mistake. She rode her fancy wherever it led her, and he might as well have tried to fix a frontier for the north wind.
 
She wrote persistently of his love, of its greatness, its gladness, its splendid illumination of her life.
 
Her exultation in a thing which had no real existence was terrible to Terence.
 
Her dull unhappy being was transformed by a miracle as wonderful as that which creates the glory of painted wings from a withered chrysalis.
 
And he had wrought it. He, by some ignorant magic, had set her life afloat on pinions frailer and more resplendent than a butterfly's, to touch which roughly was to destroy her.
 
That was, of course, too brutal to be thought of. He must accept what he had done, however little he had meant to do it; must trust to time to dull its marvel and bring the woman back to earth.
 
But there seemed little likelihood of that at first, and with the increasing rapture of her letters Terence grew ever more dismayed.
 
Yet if he tried to lure her down to sanity, an agonized reply would be flung at him by the post's return, only to make his fears more vivid, and to compel from him, in sheer abasement, an expression of sentiment which he not only did not possess, but would have shrunk from possessing.
 
"Swear," she had written, not once, nor twice; "swear that you love no other woman; that you have never loved another woman; that I fill all your thoughts!"
 
Those were easy oaths, and true; but they did not content her. It was not enough that no other woman had a lien upon his past: his whole existence must be proscribed for her.
 
"Tell me," she prayed, "that I shall be everything to you always! It kills me to think that any love could move you after mine. I cannot have renounced my pride, my honour, my self-respect, for less than that."
 
He could but smile unmirthfully at her renunciations. His were privileges, it seemed, to her thinking, that any man might sigh for; though apparently they were to include a monastic seclusion from the world of sense, a virginity devoted, not to her passion—and for passion a man might be content to live or die—but to her sentimental fancies.
 
"Say," she pleaded, unsatisfied by his replies, which to such extortionate demands could be but vague, "say that I alone of all the women in the world can ever satisfy all your longings; that it would seem a degrading sacrilege to let any other woman come after me even in your thoughts! Tell me, even though I die, that my memory must keep you true."
 
He gazed at that for a day to get his breath, but the delay was all too long for hers.
 
"Write, write," she panted, on the morrow; "I cannot live unless I hear from you. Have you no feeling for a woman's dignity that you can give me over in this way to its scorn? I fling everything that I possess before you, and you find it not even worth acknowledgment."
 
What could he say? How could he answer her? Her blindness was sublime, detestable, ridiculous, as you were pleased to view it; but to blindness one could never refuse a hand.
 
Distressed by a necessity of which he had been the unwitting cause, Terence extended his. But his ignorance mitigated his foreboding; he still trusted to time.
 
Time, however, brought him but little comfort. If her letters became saner, it was only since he had thrown her insanity a sop. When they met a month later his difficulties were increased.
 
At first she had entreated him to win her respect by a display of repression.
 
He was to be as other men were not, to keep her staunch by an undreamed-of virtue. The lover's heart must animate to her perception only the unimpeachable kindness of the friend.
 
She had her wish, but had it, perhaps, in a perfection for which she was not prepared.
 
She seemed determined to leave no doubts as to his fortitude. She hung upon him so literally that he had to exert not moral fibre only to support her.
 
She drooped like a wreath about his shoulders, while he gazed, grim and ashamed, upon her hair.
 
But she drew no consolation from his strength. It was not strength, she told him, but indifference; she had asked for a sentry, and he had given her a statue.
 
She tried to soften the statue by every feminine artifice, even, at last, by kissing its irresponsive face.
 
He, invincibly simple, smile............