“She loves you very much,” answered the Major discreetly.
“Yes—but not as she loved Boy! I was never quite a little child with her. I think”—and the girl’s fair face grew very serious—“if you once love a little child, you must always love it!”
“What, even if the child disappears altogether into a boy, and then into a man?—and perhaps an unpleasant man?” queried the Major with some amusement. But Violet did not smile.
“Yes—I think so,” she replied. “You see, you can never forget—if you ever knew—that though he may be grown into a man—perhaps a bad man—still he was a dear little child once! That’s what makes mothers so patient, I’m sure!”
She turned away, not trusting herself to say any more,—for she had loved her own mother dearly, and had never quite got over her loss.
The Major took his cigar out of his mouth and looked at its end meditatively.
“How these young creatures think nowadays!” he said. “Dear me! I never used to think about anything when I was Violet’s age. Life was all beer and skittles, as they say! I kicked about me like a young colt in a green pasture! Upon my word, I think that life is much too crowded with learning for the young folks in our present glorious age of progress. They become positively metaphysical before they’re twenty!”
Meanwhile Violet, whose heart was burdened with a secret which she was afraid to tell to her uncle, went in search of Miss Letty. It was a very warm day, though not as warm as summer days in America usually are, and the shadiest part of the house was the deep verandah, where clematis and the trumpet-vine clustered together round the light wooden pillars, and made tempting festoons of blossom for the humming-birds, which, like living jewels, poised and flew, and thrust their long slender beaks into the deep cups of the flowers, with an incessant, soft, bee-like murmur of delight. Violet, in her simple white gown, tied at the waist with a knot of ribbon, paused and shaded her eyes from the burning sunlight, while she looked right and left to see if Miss Letty were anywhere near. Yes!—there she was, sitting just inside the verandah in a low basket-chair, protected by a pretty striped awning, busy as usual with the embroidery at which she was such a skilled adept, her white fingers moving swiftly, and her whole attitude and expression one of the greatest simplicity and content.
“How peaceful she looks!” thought Violet, with a little nervous tremour—“I wonder if she will be vexed with me?”
Miss Letty at that moment raised her eyes to watch the dainty caperings of two of the humming-birds, whose exquisite blue wings glittered like large animated sapphires, and in so doing saw Violet, and smiled. The girl approached quickly, and threw herself down beside her, taking her hat off, and lifting her bright hair from her forehead with a little sigh.