'You were sitting on the passion-flower bridge, then, when you met Dr. Langdale?' said Louise afterwards, when the two were alone. 'Well, something has happened there at last. For don't you think, under the circumstances, it was almost an event?'
'Oh yes, it was an event; for we are going to be friends.'
Louise might smile covertly, and feel as sceptical as people usually are regarding friendship pure and simple between an attractive young woman and a man barely eight years her senior. But Stella, who was weary of being made love to, found this prospect of friendship very alluring; and from the first moment she met him something which she could feel, though not define, made her feel sure that Langdale was a man capable of being an intimate friend without degenerating into a lover.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
There come epochs in some lives to which the thoughts in all after-years return with infinite tenderness, and a vague wonder that, in an existence so beset with common pleasures and turmoils and disillusions, there should be this tranquil sanctuary by which always there seem to glide the sweet waters of Siloe that go with silence. Such a period for Stella were the weeks that followed. The spring was an unusually lovely one—calm, overflowing with sunshine, and yet cool. Our Australian woods do not greatly brighten or darken at the approach of any season. And the monotony of form and colour must often deepen the tendency of all well-known objects to fail in making us apprehend our surroundings with eyes quickened by imaginative insight. But here at Lullaboolagana there were groves and little woods of European trees, whose bare branches were starred with leaf-buds that swelled from day to day in the liberal sunlight and the kindly air, making the heart beat with involuntary gladness at their revelation of the dawn of returning youth. This miracle, perpetually renewed, of vegetable life so largely drawn from unseen material, has a subtle power to draw the mind into wondering conjecture as to presences, unknown as well as unseen, which may be all around and near us.
It seemed to Stella as if she fully felt for the first time the mystical significance of this ceaseless throb of returning vigour. And then the growing intimacy with a mind equipped by training and natural endowments, with a keen apprehension of the more novel forces that are moulding thought and life in the present day—equipped, too, with a calmer, more assured outlook on life than had yet dawned on her introspective, more apprehensive nature, seemed in a delightful way to realize that ideal of friendship she found so attractive. They had so much in common, and yet they were so wide apart. And this led them often far afield in talk which, though at first chiefly impersonal, yet led to a growing sympathy. This may be better realized by recording, though imperfectly, some of the talk that passed between them on successive occasions.
The second time they met at Lullaboolagana was on the wide western veranda closed with a thick screen of creepers, where Stella sat sewing beside her little invalid nephew.
'I wish you had come in time to hear Aunt Stella's story of the little lost angel,' said the boy.
'Well, hadn't you better tell it to me, Liny?' said Langdale coaxingly.
Lionel, nothing loath—he was one of the children who like to tell a story almost as much as to hear one—told in his own way the strange adventures of a little angel who, viewing the earth a long way off, fell in love with it and came to see it closer. He could fly down easily, but his wings were not strong enough to bear him back. There was a little cottage in the woods, in which a girl and her mother lived. The girl found the little angel, wet with the dew and blue with the cold, and brought him home. When his wings had dried, the mother plucked most of the feathers out to stuff a pillow with them. This grieved the angel so much that he wandered off to the woods, and sat in a very lonely place waiting for his wings to grow again. But the dragon-flies deafened him with their buzzing, the crows tried to peck his eyes out, and at last an emu put sand over him, so that he might be hatched like one of her own chicks.