ndrils 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 w