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--"you see, if I had made love my all, I should have missed it all. Not even Cousin Harry's constancy would have been proof against a withered, whining, sentimental old maid."