SWISS ENCOUNTERS
TWO girls sat in a tiny verandah, outside the third storey of a Swiss hotel, facing a horseshoe group of dazzling peaks. Or rather, one of the two faced it, while the other faced her.
She who gazed upon the mountains, a slender maiden, pale, with brown eyes and wavy hair and rather heavy dark brows, did nothing else. It was enough to be there, enough to look, enough to study and absorb Nature's glories.
But the second—a girl only by courtesy, being many years the older—a short plump vigorous person, snub-nosed, with insignificant light eyes and tow-coloured hair—seemed to find an occasional glance at lofty peaks sufficient. For each glance sent in that direction, half-a-dozen glances went towards her companion; and in addition, she busily darned a dilapidated stocking.
Despite the difference in age, a difference amounting to over twelve years, those two were intimate friends. Yet it was a friendship of sorts; not alike on both sides. The younger girl's love for her senior was gentle and sincere. The elder's love for her junior amounted to an absorbing passion. Amy Smith would have done anything, given anything, endured anything, for the sake of Beatrice Major.
"Amy—if you could only know what a delight this trip has been to me!—has been and is!"
"My dear, one couldn't watch your face and not know."
"But to think that it is all you!—that you have saved and scraped and denied yourself—and just for my sake! And I never dreaming all those months, when you said you could not afford this and that and the other—never dreaming what you had in your mind!"
"It has been one long joy to me. You wouldn't wish to deprive me of it."
"But that you should have given up so much—for me!"