Page:Ethel Churchill 3.pdf/267

Rh of the Cyrus and the Cassandra, because she had liked them in the days of her girlhood. Youth identifies itself with the romance; it is the heroic knight, or the lovely lady, of which it reads; it lives amid those fine creations; its sweetest hours are given to dreams which soon

It would have seemed ludicrous to a common observer to mark the aged woman listening by the hour to these high-flown gallantries; but it was not them that she heard, it was the remembrances that they brought. The old live more with memory than the young. Every page in that ponderous tome had some association with life's brightest hours: she lived them over again, while the murmur of that fair girl's soft tones fell sweet upon her ear. Ethel's graceful figure, seated at her grandmother's feet, completed the picture; and any one who had looked casually into that cool and cheerful chamber, would have thought it a very shrine of household happiness. And