It was not that he was handsomer, or better, or in any obvious way superior to Gilbert Fenton.

It was only that he was just the one man able to win her heart.

That mysterious attraction which reason can never reduce to rule, which knows no law of precedent or experience, reigned here in full force.

It is just possible that the desperate circumstances of the attachment, the passionate pursuit of the lover, not to be checked by any obstacle, may have had an influence upon the girl's mind.

There was a romance in such love as this that had not existed in Mr.Fenton's straightforward wooing; and Marian was too young to be quite proof against the subtle charm of a secret, romantic, despairing passion.
For some time she was very happy; and the remote farm-house, with its old-fashioned gardens and fair stretch of meadow-land beyond them, where all shade and beauty had not yet been sacrificed to the interests of agriculture, seemed to her in those halcyon days a kind of earthly paradise.