"You know what I think about the whole matter," she said. "I won't dwell on my disappointment, but it will be time enough for me to know her when you are really engaged."
What wonder that Ernest, nearing Denver, felt disheartened, oppressed by his aunt's opposition, and the indefiniteness of his relations with Eugenie.
XXII.
Miss Theodora watered the morning-glories in the little yard behind the house with sighs, if not with tears. It was a poor little garden, this spot of greenery in the desert of back yards on which her windows looked. The flowers which she cultivated were neither many nor rare. Nasturtiums, sweet peas and morning-glories were dexterously trained to hide the ugliness of the bare brown fence. She had a number of hardy geraniums and a few low-growing things between the geraniums and the border of mignonette which edged the long, narrow garden bed. In one corner of the yard there was the dead trunk of a pear tree, whose crookedness Miss Theodora had tried to hide by trying to make a quick-growing vine climb over it. Curiously enough, all these attempts had been unsuccessful, and Ernest, commenting thereon, had said, laughingly:
"Why, yes, Aunt Theodora, that stump is so ugly that not even the kitten will climb over it."
Nevertheless, there had been a time when the tree was full of leaves, and Miss Theodora, glancing at it now, a month after her nephew's departure, sighed, as she recalled how Ernest and Kate had loved to sit in its shade. Sometimes they had played shop there, when Ernest was always the clerk and Kate the buyer; but more often they had sat quietly on warm spring afternoons, while Ernest read and Kate cut out paper dolls from the fashion plates of an old magazine. Indeed, there were few things in the house or out of it that did not remind Miss Theodora of these two young people. How could she bear it, then, that their paths were to lie entirely apart?
Did Kate feel aggrieved at Ernest's attachment to "that girl," as Miss Theodora always characterized Eugenie? She wondered if she herself had been too stern in her attitude toward Ernest's love affair. She had not been severe with Ernest,—she deserved credit for that, she said to herself,—yet she recalled with a pang his expression of dismay when she had said, "Really, Ernest, you cannot expect me to call on Miss—Miss Kurtz; at least, not at present."