Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/92



old road dips here into a hollow, where an extensive thicket of wild roses encroaches upon it and diminishes it to a narrow and thorny footpath. We picked our way through it single-file and in silence. Cornelia, emerging some steps ahead, turned and waited, waist-high behind the briars, smiling—with a rose in her hand and its hue in her face. Suddenly she seemed a long way off—twenty years off. The breeze had brought youth into her eyes if not into her mind. She was very lovely, and I wished the wind might have loosened a wisp—why couldn't it?—of her sunlit hair; but that was too much for the wind. Her own arrangements had been complete.

She fixed the rose in my coat.

"Cornelia," I said, as we footed it again together over the vivid green gloss of dewberry leaves, "You remind me of an old sweetheart of the seventeenth century—who also married a diplomat. I mean Dorothy Osborne. When Temple was courting her, she wrote to him, oh quite delicious letters—one in particular, in which she says she