Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/216

208 to read it to me?" She took it with a look of surprise and curiosity, and immediately opened it and began to read. But her color soon began to vary, her hand trembled, and presently laying down the sheets in her lap, she sat lost in thought.

"It seems a moving story!" I remarked, dryly.

"Kate, this is the strangest affair!—But I can't tell you now; I must read it first alone."

She left the room, and I heard the key turn in the lock as she entered another chamber. In about an hour she came out very composedly, and said nothing more on the subject.

After our little guest was asleep at night, I could restrain myself no longer. "You are treating me shabbily, aunty," said I. "See if I am ever a good girl again to please you!"

"You shall know it all, Katy; I only wished to think it over first by myself. There, take the letter; but make no note or comment till I mention it again."

The letter of Cousin Harry seemed to me rather matter-of-fact, I must confess, till near the end, where he spoke of a little nosegay which he enclosed, and which would speak to her of dear old times.

"But where is the nosegay, aunty?"

With a beautiful flush, as if the sunset of that vanished day were reddening the sky of memory, she drew a small packet from her bosom, and in it I found a withered rose-bud tied up with a shrivelled sprig of mignonette.

I am afraid that my Aunt Linny's answer was a great deal more proper than I should have wished; and yet, with all its emphatic expressions of duty towards her father and the impossibility of leaving him, there must have been something between the lines which I could not read. I have since discovered that all such epistles have their real meaning concealed in some kind of more rarefied sympathetic ink, which betrays itself only under the burning hands of a lover.

"So, then," said Aunt Linny, as she was sealing this letter, "you see, Katy, that your romance has come to an untimely end."

I turned round her averted face with both my hands, and looked in her eyes till she blushed and laughed in spite of herself.

"My knowledge of symptoms is not large," said I, "but I have a conviction that his health will now endure a northern climate."

"Let's talk no more of this!" said she, putting me aside with a gentle gravity, which checked my nonsense. But as I was unable to detect in her, on this or the following day, the slightest depression of spirits, I shrewdly guessed that our anticipations of the result were not very dissimilar.

The next return post brought, not the expected letter, but our hero himself. I was really amazed at the change in his appearance. Erect, elastic, his face radiant with expression, he looked years younger than at his first arrival. I caught Aunt Linny's eloquent glance of surprise and pleasure as they met. For a moment the bridal pair of my dream stood living before me; then vanished even more suddenly than that fancy show of the old magician. When we again met, two or three hours after, my aunt's serene smile and dewy eyes told me that all was right.

In a month the wedding took place, and the "happy pair" started off on a few weeks' excursion. As I was helping my aunt exchange her bridal for her travelling attire, I whispered, "What say you to my doctrine of first love, aunty?"

"That it finds its best refutation in my experience. No, believe me, dearest Katy, the true jewel of life is a spirit that can rule itself, that can subject even the strongest, dearest impulses to reason and duty. Without it, indeed," she added, with a soft earnestness, "affection towards the worthiest object becomes an unworthy sentiment—And besides, Kate,"—here her eye gleamed with girlish mirth