Lisa nodded. “Yes, I suppose it was,” she said, after a moment’s reflection. “I told mamma, and that was why she was willing to have me go with Aunt Esther, for, Persis, he wasn’t near so much interested in me as I was in him, and I was getting unhappy over it; so you see I did just the right thing. Of course, girls often do have two or three fancies sometimes before they really find their true love. Mamma was such a help. She saw just how it all was, and she wrote me exactly the best things to make me get over it. Don’t think for a moment that I owe Mr. Danforth a grudge; in fact, I feel myself rather under obligations to him, for he opened my eyes to several very wholesome truths, and I am sure I should never have appreciated Richard’s goodness quite so much if Mr. Danforth had not shown me what to avoid in men and what qualities to cultivate in myself. Really I feel quite inclined to offer him my thanks.”
Persis was very thoughtful. “I should like to have had Mr. Dan for a brother,” she said.
“Really?”
“Yes, really. I wish you hadn’t told me, for I shall always be regretting. I wish now you had not gone away, for it might have been different after a while.”
Lisa shook her head. “That is disloyalty to my Richard, to which I shall not listen. Come, Perse, let’s go down. I haven’t seen grandma, remember. How I do miss the boys!”
Persis sighed. “So do I, although we see them nearly every day; but it isn’t like having them here. I actually hate to go by Basil’s room now.”
“Persis!”
“What?”
“Nothing.” And Lisa refrained from a speech which she intended to make, thinking that perhaps here was a reason for her sister’s finding no message in the roses.
“The house seems more like itself with my pretty maids all here,” Mrs. Holmes said, fondly, as she looked at the bright faces of her daughters in the library that evening. “It will be many a day before I spare one of them again.”