"Well, Tina, I had a notion that all of you were pretty fond of it, when it comes to that."
"Not of the society of men, Theophilus, but of the select attentions of gentlemen."
"I'm not taking up for Miss Matoaca," pursued the good man; "I can't conscientiously do that, and I'm more concerned at this minute about the marriage of Ben and Sally. You may smile at me as superstitious, if you please, but I never yet saw a marriage turn out happily that was made in defiance of family feeling."
As I could make no reply to this, except to put forward a second time what Mrs. Clay had tartly called "the claims of moonshine," I bade the doctor goodnight, and going upstairs to my room, sat down beside the small square window, which gave on the garden, with its miniature box borders and its single clipped yew-tree, over which a young moon was rising. "A mixture of a fighter and a dreamer," the old man had once called me, and it seemed to me now that something apart from the mere business of living and the alert man of affairs, brooded in me over the young moon and the yew-tree.
A letter from Sally had reached me a few hours before, and taking it from my pocket, I turned to the lamp and read it for the sixth time with a throbbing heart.
"You ask me if I am happy, dearest," she wrote, "and I answer that I am happy, with a still, deep happiness, over which a hundred troubles and cares ripple like shadows on a lake. But oh! poor Aunt Mitty, with her silent hurt pride in her face, and poor Aunt Matoaca, with the strained, unnatural brightness in her eyes, and her cheeks so like rose leaves that have crumpled. Oh, Ben, I believe Aunt Matoaca is living over again her own romance, and it breaks my heart. Last night I went into her room, and found her with her old yellowed wedding veil and orange blossoms laid out on the bed. She tried to pretend that she was straightening her cedar chests, but she looked so little and pitiable—if you could only have seen her! I wonder what she would be now if the General had been a man like you? How grateful I am, how profoundly thankful with my whole heart that I am marrying a man that I can trust!"
"That I can trust!" Her words rang in my ears, and I heard them again, clear and strong, the next morning, when I met Miss Matoaca as I was on my way to my office. She was coming slowly up Franklin Street, her arms filled with packages, and when she recognised me, with a shy, startled movement to turn aside, a number of leaflets fluttered from her grasp to the pavement between us. When I stooped and gathered them up, her face, under the old-fashioned poke bonnet, was brought close to my eyes, and I saw that she looked wan and pinched, and that her bright brown eyes were shining as if from fever.
"Mr. Starr," she said, straightening her thin little figure as I handed her the leaflets, "I've wanted for some time to speak a word to you on the subject of my niece—Miss Mickleborough."
"Yes, Miss Matoaca."
"My sister Mitty thought it better that I should refrain from doing so, and upon such matters she has excellent judgment. It is my habit, indeed, to yield to her opinion in everything except a question of conscience."