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 It was the evening before my bridal. I had stolen away unperceived, for I could not resist the temptation of one more quiet chat with Aunt Mary.

“I scarcely expected you to-night, my dear Jessie,” said she, as I entered, “but you are none the less welcome. Do you know I am very selfish to-night? When I ought to be rejoicing in your happiness, my heart is heavy, because I feel that I can no longer be to you what I have been, chief friend and confidant. Oh! I shall indeed miss my little Jessie.”

“You will always be to me just what you have been, Aunt Mary,” I replied, and tears filled my eyes, as I threw myself upon a low seat at her feet. “You must not think that because I am a wife, I shall love my old friends any the less: and you of all others, you who have been to me as a dear, dear elder sister,&mdash;you who have instructed and counselled me, and have shared all my thoughts and feelings since I was a little child; oh! do you think any one can come between our hearts? We may not meet as frequently as we have done, but you will ever find me just the same, and I shall tell you all my thoughts, and all my cares and sorrows, and all my joys too, just as I always have done.”

“No, no, Jessie, say not so. That may not be. You may love me just as well, but you will love another more. Your heart cannot be open to me as it has been, for it will belong to another. Its hopes, its fears, its joys, its sorrows, its cares, its love, will all be so intimately blended with those of another, that they cannot be separated. No wife, provided the relations existing between her husband and herself are what they should be, can be to any other friend exactly what she was before her marriage.”

“Why, Aunt Mary!&mdash;you surely do not mean to say that a wife should never have any confidential friends?”

“The history of woman, dear Jessie, is generally simply a record of the workings of her own heart; in ordinary cases, she has little else to consider. ‘The world of affections is her world,’ and there finds she her appropriate sphere of action. What I mean to say is,&mdash;not that a wife should have no friend save her husband,&mdash;but that, if the hearts of the twain are as closely linked together as they