"Do not you? I do; I believe she will never become ungentle by living with ungentle persons, as she does and must, if she once knows what gentle persons are. I may be all wrong, but this is what I believe; and when Laura grows up, I shall find out whether I am right. Oh! it is good to love the beautiful; and if we once really love it, we can surely not do harm."
"Miss Benette!" I exclaimed suddenly,—I really could not help it,—"I think you are an angel."
She raised her blue eyes from the shadowy length of their lashes, and fixed them upon the dim gray autumn heaven, then without a smile; but her bright face shining even with the light of which smiles are born, she replied in the words of Mignon, but with how apart a significance! "I wish I were one!" then going on, "because then I shall be all beautiful without and within me. But yet, no! I would not be an angel, for I could not then sing in our class!"
I laughed out, with the most perfect sympathy in her sentiment; and then she laughed, and looked at me exactly as an infant does in mirthful play.
"Now, Miss Benette, one more question. Mr. Davy told me the other night that you had done him good. What did he mean?"
"I do not think I can tell you what I believe he meant, because you might mention it to him; and if he did not mean that, he would think me silly, and I would not seem silly to him."
"Now, do pray tell me! Do you suppose I can go home unless you will? You have made me so dreadfully curious. I should not think of telling him you had told me. Now, what did you do for him that made him say so?"
She replied, with an innocence the sister of which I have never seen through all my dreams of woman,—
"Mr. Davy was so condescending as to ask me one day whether I would be his wife,—sometime when I am grown up. And I said, No. I think that was the good I did him."
I shall never forget the peculiar startled sensation that struck through me. I had never entertained such a notion, or any notion of the kind about anybody; and about her it was indeed new, and to me almost an awe.