"But what does it matter, after all,
since we have met at last?"
"Yes; what does it matter?"
They asked the answerless question of each other almost unconsciously,
for they were finding each other again. There are plants which may be
plucked up half-grown, before their roots have spread in the earth or
their buds ripened to blossoming, and they may lie long in dry places
till they seem withered and dead; but there is life in their fibres
still, and the power to grow is in the shrivelled stem and in the dusty
leaf, so that if they be planted again and tended they come at last to
their due maturity. Gilbert and Beatrix might have lived out their
lives apart, and in the course of years they would have been the merest
memories to each other; but having met in the slow weaving of fate's
threads, they became destined to win or lose together.
Their conversation needed but the slightest direction to take them back
to the recollections of other times, and one of the first elements of
lasting love is a common past, though that past may have covered but a
few days. To that memory lovers go back as to the starting-point of
life's journey, and though they may not speak of it often, yet its
existence is the narrow ledge on which they have reared their
stronghold in the perilous pass. And the English boy and girl had
really lived a joint life, in their sympathies and surroundings, for
years before a joint misfortune had overtaken them. In their meeting
after a long separation they felt at the same time the rare delight of
friendship renewed, and the still rarer charm of finding new
acquaintances in old friends; but besides the well-remembered bond of
habit, and the strong attraction of newly awakened interest, there was
the masterful, nameless something upon which man's world has spun for
all ages, as the material earth turns on its poles toward the sun--
always to hope beyond failure, always to life beyond death, always and
forever to love beyond life.
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