“Write the correspondence?” said Kitty, brightening; “of course I will. I don’t know what I should do without——”
“I wish,” he interrupted, “that I could think it was me you couldn’t do without.” Her pretty eyes met his over the red roses, and he caught her hands with the flowers in them. “Is it? Oh, say you can’t do without me either. Say it, say it!”
“I—I—don’t want to do without you,” said Kitty at last. He was holding her hands fast, and she was trying, not very earnestly, perhaps, to pull them away. The pair made a pretty picture.
“Oh, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!” he said softly, and then the door opened, and suddenly, without the least warning, a middle-aged lady became a spectator of the little tableau. The newcomer wore a mantle with beads on it, a black bonnet wherein nodded a violet flower—and beads and flower and bonnet were absolutely familiar to each of the astonished ones now standing consciously with the breadth of the office between them. For in that middle-aged lady the editor recognised Aunt Kate, the pleasant, sensible, companionable woman who for years had written those sympathetic “Answers to Correspondents” in the Girls’ Very Own Friend. And at the same moment Kitty recognised, beyond all possibility of doubt, Aunt Eliza—her own grim, harsh, uncongenial Aunt Eliza.
Kitty cowered—in her frightened soul she cowered. But her little figure drew itself up, and the point of her chin rose a quarter of an inch.
“Aunt Eliza,” she said firmly, “I know you will——”
“Your Aunt Eliza, Kitty?” cried the editor.
“‘Kitty’?” said the aunt.
And now the situation hung all too nicely balanced on the extreme edge of the absolutely impossible. Would this middle-aged lady—an aunt beyond doubt—an aunt who so long had played a double rôle, assume, now that one rôle must be chosen, the part of Aunt Eliza the Terrible or of Aunt Kate the Kind? The aunt was dumb. Kitty was dumb. But the editor had his wits about him, and Kate, though shaken, was not absolutely paralysed.
“It’s almost too good to be true,” he said, “that my Aunt Kate is really your Aunt Eliza. Aunt Kate, Kitty and I have just decided that we can’t do without each other. I am so glad that you are the first to wish us joy.”