That day has long come and gone; it is easy to see all that now—to have the eyes of Monsieur le Major.
Ah, poor little Mimsey, with her cropped head and her pale face, and long, thin arms and legs, and grave, kind, luminous eyes, that have not yet learned to smile. What she is to me!!!!
And Madame Seraskier, in all the youthful bloom and splendor of her sacred beauty! A chosen lily among women—the mother of Mary!
She sits on the old bench by the willow, close to her daughter's gloves. Sometimes (a trivial and almost comic detail!) she actually seems to sit upon them, to my momentary distress; but when she goes away, there they are still, not flattened a bit—the precious mould of those beautiful, generous hands to which I owe everything here and hereafter.
* * * * *
I have not been again to my old home. I dread the sight of the avenue. I cannot face "Parva sed Apta."
But I have seen Mary again—seven times.
And every time she comes she brings a book with her, gilt-edged and bound in green morocco like the Byron we read when we were children, or in red morocco like the Elegant Extracts out of which we used to translate Gray's "Elegy," and the "Battle of Hohenlinden," and Cunningham's "Pastorals" into French.
Such is her fancy!
But inside these books are very different. They are printed in cipher, and in a language I can only understand in my dream. Nothing that I, or any one else, has ever read in any living book can approach, for interest and importance, what I read in these. There are seven of them.