“Will you take dinner, here, sir,” I said, “or in the coffee-room?”
“Oh, here, please, if you don’t mind,” said the young lady, turning round from the window in a minute, and looking at me quite anxiously.
“Oh, it’s no trouble,” I said. “All your meals can be served here.”
“Thank you,” she said; and they both seemed quite relieved at not having to go down in the coffee-room.
Before dinner they went out for a little walk, and I stood at the door and looked after them as they strolled away.
Oh, how happy they looked!—his arm through hers, and his head bent down a little listening to her. It made a tear come into my eye as I watched them.
I think it is so beautiful to see young sweethearts together like that, in the first beautiful sunshine of their married life, without a care, without a thought except for each other. I think it must be one of the most beautiful things in life, that first happy married love, that first “together,” with no good-bye to come, and the future looking so bright and peaceful. Troubles must come, we know. It’s very few couples who can go on to the end of the journey loving and trusting and worshipping like that; but even when the troubles come, there is that dear old happy, holy time—the purest and most sacred happiness that we get in this world—to look back upon; and it is so bright in our memory that its light can reach still to where we stand in the darkness, and make that darkness less.
I know it’s sentimental, as they call it, to talk like that; but I can’t help being sentimental when I write about that happy boy-husband and girl-wife—write it at a time when I have had my own little troubles of married life; only little ones, Harry is so good—and my own love and my own honeymoon get mixed up in my mind with theirs, and that makes sentimental thoughts come into my head.
When they came in just before dinner, the table was ready laid for them, and I had gathered some flowers and made a nice nosegay, and put it in a glass, to make the table look nice; and I waited on them myself—Susan, the housemaid, carrying the dishes up for me.
The young lady looked so pretty with her hat off when she sat down to dinner, her cheeks bright with the air and the sunshine, and her eyes—those beautiful, gentle brown eyes that have such a world of love in them—watching her husband every moment, that for a minute I stood and looked at her instead of taking the cover off the soles.