As the summer advanced, Olive Rothesay and her new friend, sanctioned by the elders of both families, took long walks together, read, and practised. Not that Olive practised, for she had no voice, and little knowledge of music; but she listened to Sara's performances for hours, with patience, if not with delight. And when they talked—oh, what talks those were!
Now, reader, be not alarmed lest we should indulge you with the same. Go back into your own repertoire of early friendships, and that will suit us quite as well Still, we may just say that these young friends flitted like bees over every subject under heaven, and at last alighted on the subject most interesting at their age—love.
It is curious to note how the heart first puts out its tendrils and stretches them forth toward the yet unknown good which is to be in after-life its happiness and its strength. What folly of parents to repress these blind seekings after such knowledge—this yearning which nature teaches, and which in itself involves nothing wrong. Girls will think of love, whether or no! How much better, then, that they should be taught to think of it rightly, as the one deep feeling of life. Not, on the one hand, to be repressed by ridicule; nor, on the other, to be forced by romance into a precocious growth; but to be entered upon, when fate brings the time, rationally, earnestly, and sacredly.
Olive Rothesay found, with considerable pain, that Miss Derwent and she did not at all agree in their notions of love. Olive had always felt half-frightened at the subject, and never approached it save with great awe and timidity; but Sara did not seem to mind it in the least. She talked of a score of “flirtations” at quadrille parties—showed her friend half-a-dozen complimentary billets-doux which she had received, and all with the greatest unconcern. By degrees this indifference vanished under the influence of Olive's more earnest nature; and at last, when they were sitting together one night, listening to the fierce howling of the wind, a little secret came out.
“I don't like that equinoctial gale,” said Sara, shyly. “I used to hear so much of its horrors from a friend I have—at sea.”
“Indeed. Who was that?”
“Only Charles Geddes. Did I never speak of him? Very likely not—because I was so vexed at his leaving college and running off to sea. It was a foolish thing. But don't mention him to papa or the boys.” And Sara blushed—a real, good, honest blush.
Olive did the same—perhaps from sympathy. She continued very thoughtful for a long time; longer even than Sara. They were not many days in making out between them the charming secret for which in their hearts they had been longing. Both were thirsting to taste—or at least to see each other taste—of that enchanting love-stream, the stream of life or of death, at whose verge they had now arrived.
And so, it somehow chanced that, however the conversation began, it usually glided into the subject of Charles Geddes. Sara acknowledged that he and she had always liked one another very much, though she allowed that he was fonder of her than she was of him; that, when they parted, he had seemed much agitated—and she had cried—but they were mere boy and girl then. It was nothing—nothing at all.
Olive did not think so; and, contrasting all this with similar circumstances in her pet poems and novels, she wove a very nice romance round Charles Geddes and her beloved Sara, whom she now began to look upon with greater interest and reverence than ever. This did not prevent her reading Sara a great many lectures on constancy, and giving her own opinions on what true love ought to be—opinions which were a little too ethereal for Miss Derwent's comprehension, but which she liked very much, nevertheless.