"What sort of things, Viola dear? I'm not a child, though perhaps they have tried to keep me one for too long, at home. I'm going to take care of you, for all our lives. I ought to know as much as you do."
"I hope you never will, darling," she said, a little sadly. "I know that the things I have learnt haven't spoilt me, or else I shouldn't feel so happy as I do in your loving me. But other people might not believe that. We're very young, both of us. We love as deeply as people who are older love, and we know we shall go on loving each other all our lives. But others wouldn't believe that. They would try to part us. They would part us, as long as I stayed here; and there's such a little time left. Oh, let us be happy together while it lasts, and keep our lovely secret."
"Why should they try to part us, Viola? Who is there? My grandmother and my mother. If they only saw you!"
She smiled at him. "It wouldn't be enough," she said, "whatever I was. And they wouldn't look at me with your eyes. Perhaps nobody else would. What was it made you love me so much, Harry?"
He had told her a hundred times, and now told her again; and she told him that she had loved him the very first moment she had set eyes on him, riding up on his gallant horse with his dogs around him. "You were like a splendid young knight," she said. "No girl could have helped loving you. But I love you a thousand times more now than I did then, and I suppose I shall go on loving you more and more all my life."
It was like the old stories of his childhood, which had to be told over and over again, and were better every time they were told. But now it was not as it had been then, when no variation must be admitted in the telling. There was always something new—some little discovery that deepened the sense of perfection and wonderment, some answering thought that showed them to have been close to one another, even in the hours in which they were parted and were pasturing on their sweet memories of one another.
It was with a kind of solemnity of sweetness that Harry dwelt upon Viola's trust in him and his manhood. By a thousand little signs it had been made plain that she knew more of the world than he, but she put all that knowledge aside and looked up to him and submitted to him as if infinite wisdom and experience were his. And in truth he had grown greatly in mental stature since her love had come into his life to change it so completely. They must have remarked upon it at home if he had not taken such advantage of the freedom that was granted him and been so little at home at this time. His mother actually had told him that he was altered, after he had expressed himself with more than usual self-confidence when they had talked about the war over the dinner-table. She was always on the look-out for signs of something that might take him from her, and she feared the war and what might come of it with an unreasoning fear, considering the information at her command. Harry was thinking a great deal about the war now, which does not mean that there were any times at which he was not thinking about Viola. With the coming of love his sense of the deeper values of life had become strengthened. If he had felt himself borne along on a strong current that would carry him to whatever of action or duty or mere state of being that was laid down for him, then whatever happened to him was part of the whole, and nothing in his life would be dissociated from anything else. It was this sense of unity that lifted his fresh boy's adoration of a girl as young and as pure as himself into something bigger and more rooted than that, beautiful as it is. His love gave the divine note of joy to all his purpose, sweetened and solemnized it at the same time. It was not like a great happiness in which he could forget himself, and which he must also forget for a time if something more serious had to be faced.
This morning, for the first time, influenced perhaps by the breath from outside which had come through Wilbraham's advent upon the scene, which, however, they put aside from them, they talked about the time when Viola should have gone away.
Their extreme youth moved them to sadness, which was not wholly painful because the time was not near yet, and present bliss was only heightened by the thought of parting. They were so far unlike most young lovers that no mention was made of writing, or even of meeting again. It was as if the contact between them was so close and so sure that however far apart they might be in space, and for whatever time, they would still be together.
Harry was serious about the future. "I don't know exactly what is going to happen," he said. "I'm supposed to be going to Sandhurst in January, but that's a long time ahead. I seem to see the war swallowing up everything. There's something to be done here about it, and perhaps it will be for me to do it. But there's nothing to show yet. I think there won't be till you go away, my darling. I think there's nothing that will come in the way of my being with you, and thinking about nothing but you."