Her aunt smiled and gently stroked her niece’s hand. “When the time comes, I shall bid you God speed, Paula. I am no ogress to tie my dove’s wings to her nest. Love and the home it provides are the natural lot of women. None feel it more than those who have missed both.”
“Aunt!” Paula was shocked and perplexed. A breaking wave full of doubts and possibilities, seemed to dash over her at this suggestion.
“Young men of judgment and principle do not come so many miles to see a youthful maiden, without a purpose,” continued her aunt inexorably. “You know that, do you not, Paula?”
“Yes; but the purpose may differ in different cases,” returned the young girl hurriedly. “I would not like to believe that Mr. Ensign came here with the one you give him credit for—not yet. You trouble me, aunt,” pursued she, glancing tremulously about. “It is like opening a great door flooded with sunshine, upon eyes scarcely strong enough to bear the glimmer sifting through its cracks. I feel humiliated and—” She did not finish, perhaps her thought itself was incomplete.
“If a light comes sifting through the cracks, I am satisfied,” said her aunt in a lighter tone than common. And she kissed her niece, and went smiling out of the room, murmuring to herself,
“I have been over-fearful; everything is coming right.”
There are moments when life’s great mystery overpowers us; when the riddle of the soul flaunts itself before us unexplained, and we can do no more than stand and take the rush of the tide that comes sweeping down upon us. Paula was not the girl she was before she went to New York. Love was no longer a dreamy possibility, a hazy blending of the unknown and the fancied; its tale had been too often breathed in her ear, its reality made too often apparent to her eye. But love to which she could listen, was as new and fresh and strange, as a world into which her