in earnest. From
the boy he had suddenly started up into the man; and his parents saw it.
They looked at him, and then mournfully at one another. The father was
the first to speak.
"All this is very sudden. You should have told us of it before."
"I did not know it myself till--till very lately," the youth answered
more softly, lowering his head and blushing.
"Is Miss Silver--is the lady aware of it?"
"No."
"That is well," said the father, after a pause. "In this silence you
have acted as an honourable lover should towards her; as a dutiful son
should act towards his parents."
Guy looked pleased. He stole his hand nearer his mother's, but she
neither took it nor repelled it; she seemed quite stunned.
At this point I noticed that Maud had crept into the room;--I sent her
out again as quickly as I could. Alas! this was the first secret that
needed to be kept from her; the first painful mystery in our happy,
happy home!
In any such home the "first falling in love," whether of son or
daughter, necessarily makes a great change. Greater if the former than
the latter. There is often a pitiful truth--I know not why it should
be so, but so it is--in the foolish rhyme which the mother had
laughingly said over to me this morning!
"My son's my son till he gets him a wife,
My daughter's my daughter all her life."
And when, as in this case, the son wishes to marry one whom his father
may not wholly approve, whom his mother does not heartily love, surely
the pain is deepened tenfold.
Those who in the dazzled vision of youth see only the beauty and
splendour of love--first love, who deem it comprises the whole of life,
beginning, aim, and end--may marvel that I, who have been young and now
am old, see as I saw that night, not only the lover's but the parents'
side of the question. I felt overwhelmed with sadness, as, viewing the
three, I counted up in all its bearings and consequences, near and
remote, this attachment of poor Guy's.
"Well, father," he said at last, guessing by intuition that the
father's heart would best understand his own.
"Well, my son," John answered, sadly.
"YOU were young once."
"So I was;" with a tender glance upon the lad's heated and excited
countenance. "Do not suppose I cannot feel with you. Still, I wish
you had been less precipitate."
"You were little older than I am when you married?"
"But my marriage was rather different from this projected on
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