CHAPTER VI. HER STORY.
New Year's Morning. So, this long-anticipated festival-week is ended, and the old year gone. Poor old year!
“He gave me a friend and true, true love,
And the New Year will take them away.”
Ah, no, no, no!
Things are strange. The utmost I can say of them is, that they seem very strange. One would suppose, if one liked a friend, and there existed no reasonable cause for not shewing it, why one would shew it, just a little? That, with only forty miles between—a half-hour's railway ride not to run over and shake hands—to write a letter and not to mention one's name therein, was, at least, strange. Such a small thing, even under any pressure of business—just a line written, an hour spared. Talk of want of time! Why, if I were a man I would make time, I would—
Simpleton! what would you do, indeed, when your plainest duty you do not do,—just to wait and trust.
Yet I do trust. Once believing in people, I believe in them always, against all evidence except their own—ay, and should to the very last—“until death us do part.”
Those words have set me right again, showing me that I am not afraid, either for myself or any other, even of that change. As I have read somewhere, all pure love of every kind partakes in this of the nature of the love divine, “neither life nor death, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature,” are able to separate or annihilate it. One feels that—or if one does not feel it, it is not true love, is worth nothing, and had better be let go.