CHAPTER XLVIII. “IN GOLD CLASPS LOCKS IN THE GOLDEN STORY.”
Love is like a bright river when it springs from the fresh fountains of the heart. It flows on between fair and ever-widening banks until it reaches the ocean of eternity and happiness.
The days illuminated with the brightest sunshine are those which smile over the heads of a loving pair who have found each other, and with tender confessions and mutual avowals plighted their troth and prepared their little bark for sailing together down the changeful stream of time.
So it had been through the long Indian summer days with Pierre Philibert and Amélie de Repentigny. Since the blessed hour they plighted their troth in the evening twilight upon the shore of the little lake of Tilly, they had showed to each other, in the heart's confessional, the treasures of true human affection, holy in the eyes of God and man.
When Amélie gave her love to Pierre, she gave it utterly and without a scruple of reservation. It was so easy to love Pierre, so impossible not to love him; nay, she remembered not the time it was otherwise, or when he had not been first and last in her secret thoughts as he was now in her chaste confessions, although whispered so low that her approving angel hardly caught the sound as it passed into the ear of Pierre Philibert.
A warm, soft wind blew gently down the little valley of the Lairet, which wound and rippled over its glossy brown pebbles, murmuring a quiet song down in its hollow bed. Tufts of spiry grass clung to its steep banks, and a few wild flowers peeped out of nooks among the sere fallen leaves that lay upon the still greensward on each shore of the little rivulet.
Pierre and Amélie had been tempted by the beauty of the Indian summer to dismount and send their horses forward to the city in charge of a servant while they walked home by way of the fields to gather the last flowers of autumn, which Amélie said lingered longest in the deep swales of the Lairet.
A walk in the golden sunshine with Amélie alone amid the quiet fields, free to speak his love, and she to hear him and be glad, was a pleasure Pierre had dreamt of but never enjoyed since the blessed night when they plighted their troth to each other by the lake of Tilly.
The betrothal of Pierre and Amélie had been accepted by their friends on both sides as a most fitting and desirable match, but the manners of the age with respect to the unmarried did not admit of that freedom in society which prevails at the present day.