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“Won’t Colonel Stoddart wait?” I said, waxing bolder. I had slipped down on the floor beside her and was stroking her white hand. I hoped I was saying the right thing. I was adoringly fond of her, but I was also eighteen, and this was my first introduction to a real romance. I was feverishly anxious to rise to the occasion, to have nothing to regret in retrospect.

“I daresay he would. I think he said something about it,” she said apathetically.

I remembered a beautiful sentence I had read in a novel about confidences being mutual, and I said reproachfully, “Aunt Emmy, I have told you all about Lord K—-; won’t you tell me, just me, no one else–about Mr. Kingston?”

And she told me. I think it was a relief to speak to some one. I held my cheek against her hand all the time. It seemed that a sort of demigod of the name of Kingston had alighted in her life when she was nineteen (I felt with a pang that I had still a whole year to wait) and he was twenty-one. Aunt Emmy waxed boldly eloquent in her description of his unique and heroic character, shyly eloquent in her dispassionate indication of his almost terrifying beauty.

I think Aunt Emmy became a girl in her teens again for a few minutes, carried away by her memory, and by the idolising sympathy of the other girl in her teens at her feet in a seventh heaven at being a confidant. But in one sense, on the sentimental plane, she had never ceased to be a girl. She and I viewed the situation almost from the same standpoint.

“Aunt Emmy, was he tall?”

“He was, my love.”

“And slender?”

My whole life hung in the balance. I had all a young girl’s repulsion towards stout men.

“He was thin and wiry, and very athletic, a great rider.”

I gave a sigh of relief.

“Did his–it does not really matter” (I felt the essentials were all right and that I must not ask too much of life)–“but did his hair curl?”

Aunt Emmy drew out of her bosom a little locket, hanging by a thin gold chain, with a forget-me-not in blue enamel on it, and opened it. Inside was a curl of chestnut hair. It was not tied in the shape of a curl. It was a real curl.

I looked at it with awe.

Aunt Emmy answered my highest expectations at every point. I had never seen that enamel locket before. Yet I divined at once that she had worn it under her clothes–as indeed she had, day and night for how many years! I felt that I would not care how it ended, happily or unhappily, if only I might have a romance and a locket like that.

“He gave it me when we parted eighteen years ago,” she said, her voice quivering a little.

I knew well that lovers always did part. They invariably severed, “severed for years.” I was not the least surprised to hear he was gone, for I was already learning “In the Gloaming,” and trilled it forth in a thin, throaty voice which Aunt Emmy said was remarkably like what hers had been at my age.

“Why were you parted?” I asked.

“He had not any money, and he had his way to make. And he had an uncle out there who wanted him to go to him. It was a good opening, though he would not have taken it if it had not been for me, for though he was so fond of horses he was not the kind of person for that kind of life, sheep and things. He cared so much for books and poetry. And your Uncle Thomas was very much against my marrying at that time, in fact, he positively forbade it. You see, mother was dead, and your Uncle Thomas had become more dependent on me than he was quite aware until there was a question of my leaving him. Men are like that, my love. They need a woman all the time to look after them, and listen to their talk, and keep vexatious things away. And he was always a most tender father. He said he could not bear the thought of his only daughter roughing it in Australia. He said he would withdraw his opposition if–if–Bob (Bob was his name) came home with a sufficient fortune to keep me in comfort in England.”