A GIRL’S FIRST LOVE.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 17, Issue 59, 27 July 1906, Page 2

A GIRL’S FIRST LOVE.

(All Rights' Reserved.)

BY MRS. NELLIE WYATT. *•— . Others may come after him—others usually do come after him, for seldom is it that a girl marries her first lore —but to none does she attach that strange interest, sacred with never-expressed words, which attaches to her lost sweetheart. Her memory of him is like a faint, delicate perfume which still clings about that first wild rose of summer that he gave her during the first tete-a-tete walk that they ever took together in the 1 woods. How well she remembers it all ! It was the first summer after she had left school. It was a little out-of-the-way summer resort where she ha,d been staying with a party of friends where he chanced to come too, and after meeting her, lingered. She was a little fluttered at finding herself walking alone with him, quite by accident of course; both tried to keep up a lively and natural, conversation, and as a consequence it was perfectly absurd, somewhat constrained and altogether fragmentary. ' Then he saw this rose, the only one upon a . bushful of buds that grew close to the moss-grown trunk of a fallen tree, just over the source of a tiny stream of water that wound like a tangle thread, in and out among the trees.

He gathered and gave it to her with a half-shy, half-laughing look—so transparently conscious in his endeavours to be unconscious, and with a remark intended to be sprightly. And she took it between a blush and a smile, with a swift uplook from her eyes that were busily playing hide-and.seek under the becoming shelter of her long lashes. She tucked it in the waistband of her dress, just as she would have done any other rose. He does not know —he never will know that as soon as she was alone in her room, with the door locked, she drew it carefully from her belt and kissed it daintily, though with suppressed passion, before, she exalted it to a position of honour in her pet. vase of pretty china just big enough to hold this flower fitly, and in honour of it filled carefully with cool water by her own pretty fresh fingers, as lily-tipped as those of Aurora in the act. of drawing the curtains of the dawn.

What was the unspoken compact between them that caused her, standing before her glass in her simple white dress that evening to pose the flower shyly along the burnished waves of her hair ? Will she ever forgot how his eyes thanked her ? Will she ever forget the night on which she wore it ? Was there ever another night like that ? Will there ever be again ? For her, ho. For every girl who has to meet her first love, yes. There will be just one such for each girl, but never another. Was it the earth she trod on ? How beautiful everything was ! As if the world was just new-made ! And when she danced with him she seemed to have wings to her feet. Then at last they were alone together in the cool, fragrant dewy darkness outside; and to be together, to be arm in arm, to hear each other’s voices, that was all they cared for. There was no other world for them to-night. They were separated from our common earth by such a swift-flowing tide of deep but unspoken delight—unspoken because young affection is too sacred for words. First-love is born dumb, and learns speech but slowly. Beep down in eac£ heart was the rapturous consciousness of loving and of being loved by the other, which is worth a lifetime of " I love you’s ” It brimmed each heart with a sufficing delight, even as the-world .drinks in this-fountain of innocent gladness But the dew has been in the flowercup and in the girl’s heart, first love, whose memory never departs. The wild rose in her hair was withered when she again stood before her glass, with flushed cheeks and a new brightness in her eyes. But she laid it—as carefully as a young mother might lay her firstborn in its cradle—between two pages of Tennyson, upon a poem that he had read to her the day before. It rests there still. To a careless observer what matters a worn volume of Tennyson with a withered wild rose pressed between its pages ? But to her it is all that is left, maybe, of the purest and tenderest romance of a girl's life —it is the gift of her first lover !