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“I also hoped it, my dear,” said Aunt Emmy, snipping the lavender into a little basket, held in a loose white-gloved hand.

I dared not look at her.

“Mr. Kingston has not written,” she said after a moment.

“But did you write and tell him you were free, and still in the same mind?”

“I did not. I thought it might be awkward for him in case he were–after all these years–contemplating some other possibility. I did not want to embarrass him. But your Uncle Thomas’s death was in all the papers, and many of his relations are acquainted with us. I have no doubt the news reached him.”

Of course it had. I had felt that it was hardly to be expected that Mr. Kingston should have kept after twenty years, more than twenty years, the same vivid memory of his early love that she had done. His silence proved that he had not done so. I looked at Aunt Emmy. How pretty and graceful and remote she looked, and how young her face was under the shadow of her charming garden hat, tied with a soft black ribbon under her chin. As long as she was not confronted with any one really young, she had no look of age. It was difficult to believe that she was forty-four. And he must be forty-six. It was too late. Middle-aged marriages are risky affairs enough, when the Rubicon of forty is within sight. But when it has been passed—-!

As I looked at her I hoped with all my heart that he would not come back to disturb her peace of mind and dislocate her life afresh.

But, astonishing to say, he did come back; and there was some adequate reason, I have forgotten exactly what, for his not coming earlier. At any rate, it was adequate.

When I came down to breakfast a few days later, Aunt Emmy held a letter towards me with a shaking hand. Her lips trembled. She could not articulate.

“Am I really to read it?”

She nodded.

It was a charming letter, written in a delicate, refined hand. Mr. Kingston had not heard of her father’s death till the day before he wrote. He had been away up-country for a year, broken shoulder, etc. He was starting for England at once. He should travel almost as quickly as his letter. He should present himself at Pembridge Square and learn her address directly he landed. His ship was the Sultana.

I took up the morning paper.

“The Sultana arrived yesterday,” I said.

I looked at the envelope. It was directed on from Pembridge Square.

“Tom will give him my address,” said Aunt Emmy faintly. “I wonder how he knows I am not living there now. He will–arrive here–to-day. “

She looked straight in front of her through the open windows to the hollyhocks basking in the still September sunshine. A radiance lit up her face, like that which perhaps shone on Christian’s when at last across the river he saw the pearl gates of the New Jerusalem.

“At last!” she said. “After all these years! After all these dreadful, dreadful years!”

An unbearable pain went through me. It was not new to me. I had known it once before, when I had seen my child sicken. Why did it return now?

The radiance passed. A pitiful trembling shook her like a leaf. Her eyes turned helplessly to mine, frightened and dimmed.

“I forgot I am an old woman,” she said.

I kissed her hand. I told her that she was handsomer than any one. She was very dignified and gentle.

“You are very kind to me, my dear, and it is sweet of you to feel as you do. I believe, as you say, that I am still nice-looking. But the fact remains that it is nearly twenty-five years since we have seen each other. I was nineteen then. And oh! I suppose I ought not to say it, but I was pretty. People turned to look at me in the street. And now I am forty-four.”