I answered, “Yes!”
“You must be almost forty,” he next remarked. “You have worn passably well, but you are no longer young.”
“I am thirty-seven!” said I. — “Well!” he answered. “You are certainly old enough to know your own business best.”
“That was all that passed. But I was glad to remember, as I looked at his whitening hair and bowed shoulder, that Frederic had not—as I was foolish enough to suppose for a while—told him the story that had blighted his life. Not that I could have blamed him had he done this. He had endured so much obloquy, suffered so keenly and so long, that almost any retaliatory measure would have been pardonable.”
Herbert Dorrance's widow was, as had been said, on a farewell visit to her native State, and after spending a week at Ridgeley was concluding a pleasanter sojourn of the same length at William Sutton's. In another month her home in Philadelphia was to be the refuge of her aunt's declining years—a prospect that delighted her as much as it afflicted those among whom this most benevolent and lovable of match-makers had dwelt during Mabel's first marriage.
The marriage it was now her constant purpose to forget—not a difficult task in the happiness that diffused an Indian summer glow over her maturity of years and heart. After Herbert's death she had continued to reside in Albany, devoting herself—so soon as she recovered from the fatigue of mind and body consequent upon her severe and protracted duties as nurse—to the scarcely less painful work of attending his mother, who had contracted the seeds of consumption in the bleak sea-air of Boston. Grateful for an abode in the house of one who performed a daughter's part to her when her own children were content to commit her to the care of hirelings, the old lady lingered six months, and died, blessing her benefactress and engaging, in singleness of belief in the affection his wife had borne him, “to tell Herbert how good she had been to his mother.”
None of the Dorrances could wag a tongue against their sister-in-law, when, at the expiration of her year of widowhood, she wrote to them, to announce her “re-engagement” to Frederic Chilton. She had been a faithful wife to their brother in sickness and imbecility; a ministering angel to their parent, and there was now no tie to bind her to their interest. They had a way of taking care of themselves, and it was not surprising if she had learned it.
They behaved charmingly—this pair of elderly lovers—said the young Suttons when Mr. Chilton arrived to escort his affianced back to Albany on the day succeeding the conversation from which I have taken the foregoing extracts, while Aunt Rachel's deaf old face was one beam of gratification.
“All my matches turn out well in the long run!” she boasted, with modest exultation. “I don't undertake the management of them, unless I am very sure that they are already projected in Heaven. And when they are, my loves, a legion of evil spirits or, what is just as bad, of wicked men and women, cannot hinder everything from coming right at last.”
While she was relating, in the same sanguinely pious spirit, the tales that most entrance young girls, and at which their seniors smile in cynicism, or in tender recollection, as their own lives have contradicted or verified her theory of love's teachings and love's omnipotence, Frederic and Mabel, forgetting time and care, separation and sorrow, in the calm delight of reunion, were strolling upon the piazza in the starlight of a perfect June evening.