Then, too, there was what I may venture to call a presentiment of love in Gerald Eversley’s relation to Miss Venniker. It lay in his old affection for her brother. Life is full of such presentiments, fuller than we know. But is it wrong to say that there are those whom it is natural to love? We love them for their own sake, but partly too we are predisposed to love them by the love we bear for others. It is as if a pre-established sympathy, a sort of communion of saints, existed between them and us, even when we have never seen them as yet. Miss Venniker was endowed in Gerald Eversley’s view not only with her own charm, rare as it was, but with her brother’s too. To be linked to her was to be linked to him, to him perpetually. The old schoolboy friendship would be consolidated, nay, it would be sanctified by a deeper and holier sympathy. Is the thought fanciful? is it visionary? Have I not known elsewhere instances of men who have loved the brother first, and then--with a still stronger love--his sister? and can there be any guarantee more beautiful for the perfectness of the married life than this meeting, this blending of the old love and the new in one deep, holy, peaceful current of devotion? It must be remembered, too, that Ethel Venniker had come in Gerald Eversley’s eyes almost naturally to seem an idol. She stood above him. He could not look upon her without feeling that his thoughts were raised. She was so far better than anybody or anything that he had known at Kestercham, that her presence was ever as a delightful surprise. It was not her beauty alone or her grace or her goodness that told upon him; it was the union of them all. How wonderful, how sacred is the feeling of a first love! All the world seems to be smiling on that day. It is a feeling that can never come again. All the highest experiences of life come once only. To have been in love, as it is said, twice is never to have been in love once. How pure the feeling is and precious and all-absorbing! O dass sie ewig grünen bliebe, Die schöne Zeit der jungen Liebe! Gerald Eversley was in love. He had entered into that paradise of hopes, fears, dreams, anticipations, ecstasies. Why is it called ‘falling in love’? I can never tell. It is not a falling, but a rising to the gates of heaven. Gerald Eversley knew that in the tangled path of life there was one hand that by its touch thrilled his spirit, one voice above all others that was music in his ears. To be with her, to see her, to listen to her was heaven. He dared not tell his love, he did not even desire to tell it yet; he lived in the present, he shrank from knowing or imagining the future. And Ethel Venniker--did she never guess his secret? There is nothing to show. But human nature has many languages, and it may be that the language of the eyes and of the heart is more eloquent than that of the lips. It is not easy to keep from a woman a secret concerning herself.