In his pocket-book was still preserved the young primrose springing from dead leaves, with which, long ago, Amethyst had illustrated her saying that “beginnings come out of endings.”
It was no inapt type of the sweet hopes springing up in these days of mourning—hopes all the sweeter for the generous reverence with which they waited for fulfilment.
Chapter Thirty Five.
The Power of the Past.
While all the bitterness of past wrongs was thus, for Amethyst, softening into a tender haze of memory, it became apparent to Una that a new future was offered to herself.
The pleasant, wholesome intercourse that had begun for her at Restharrow, had made the days cheerful at Bordighera, and, together with health much improved by the southern climate, had brought her for the first time something of the natural gaiety of her eighteen years. She very soon knew quite well, that her presence made the pleasure for Wilfred Jackson, that he sought her at every possible moment, and offered her the natural and innocent courtship of a warm-hearted youth, which ought to have been the opening of all the joys and rights of her young womanhood.
But behind her lay, not the “duties enough and little cares” of unawakened childhood, not the playful preferences of attractive girlhood, but the searing, burning memory of premature passion.
She let the pleasant thing go on, she hesitated and doubted, for she liked Wilfred Jackson very much, and she liked—she always would like—intercourse that was touched with possibilities of emotion. And she would have been so glad to forget all her miserable past, to go on into a happy future.