‘Not know her! She is as fairly pictured in my mind, with her bright silky locks and fawnlike eyes, as if I had only kissed her last night ere she went to her little bed.’
‘But then fourteen years make a vast change. The woman of seventeen obliterates the child of three—by what token could you assure yourself beyond doubt?’
‘Token—woman of seventeen!’ repeated Fabricius wonderingly, as though a new light had struck upon his brain; ‘my little Aurelia a woman of seventeen!’
‘Ay, truly, she must be, if alive,’ responded Martialis, regarding him curiously.
The old man rose from his seat and walked across the room and back. Here was a problem as startling as it was simple, since, strange to say, it had never by any chance been suggested to his thoughts. His mind, up to this moment, had been thoroughly filled, and absorbed to the exclusion of every other reflection, by the picture of the ill-fated child as he had last seen her, say, dancing about his room, or sporting with her ball in the garden, as he passed out on a visit or a walk.
‘My little maid a woman of seventeen!’ he repeated again in a bewildered manner.
‘Not so strange as that you should expect to find her as she was,’ observed Martialis; ‘stature increases, and form changes and develops; eyes alter, and hair changes in hue with years.’
‘That is true,’ said Fabricius absently.
‘Well then, how would you prove her identity?’
‘My heart would tell me!’ replied the other fervently.