Page:Quartette - Kipling (1885).djvu/25

 what I don't pretend to you know. So stay on with us, my boy, and say no more about it."

This invitation so cordially given by her husband was repeated by Laura with kindly grace; and I accepted it gladly. Already I had made my home in their hospitable house, but from this date began a life of greater intimacy. Instead of carrying back to my own quarters at night the books which I had read during the day, they found a permanent place in Laura's room; and the familiar copies of my favourite authors lay on the same table with her work or desk. I read aloud to her every day, and discovered similarities of taste which I flattered myself were due to sympathies of nature.

I showed her verses which I had written at College, in which I had striven to immortalise the transient emotions of boyhood; and felt honoured by her criticism, which was always intelligent and appreciative. I induced her to speak of her past life, of her innocent eighteen years in a country home where she seemed to have known no excitement greater than a Sunday school fête, or an occasional visit to some quite watering-place. Her mother had been left a widow when Laura was an infant, and she had passed from childhood to girlhood without events of any importance to disturb her tranquillity. She had not been to school, but her mother had proved a careful and able instructress; and what she had learned had been supplemented by what she had read, and it seemed to me that no educational process could have better developed her sympathetic nature and original mind. On the subject of her marriage she spoke little, but I gathered that she had met her husband at the house of a distant relative to whom she was paying a visit; that her engagement had been a short one; and that she had left England immediately after her marriage—now some three years since. Though I often lost myself in dangerous speculations on the subject, I never dared to refer in any way to her sentiments towards her husband, who, good fellow as he was, and to his young wife affectionate and most indulgent, had not, I felt certain, awakened in her heart any feeling warmer than that of gratitude. Her love for her baby daughter was the strongest emotion she had ever known. Of that I felt assured; and I suspected in her life loops and gaps that remained empty, while at the bottom of her heart lay an