Then she spoke of Diana. "Hers is a wonderful character, and I often think how beautiful it is that she should follow your dear mother at Hames."
"You feel that?" I said.
"Very, very strongly, dear. How happy it must have made her to feel that her grandchildren should have such a mother. I may be wrong, and you will smile at an old woman's prejudice and think that she is looking back with prejudiced eyes into that wonderful past which is always so much better than any present. I am not, but still it seems to me that Diana has something that all young people have not got nowadays, a reverence for the old, an admiration for the good, and a pity for the poor and distressed. These things take you far through life, dear, and, combined with her wonderful vitality and beauty, make her a power.
"Talking of your beautiful mother, it was said years ago that she was the only woman of whom I had ever been jealous. I am old enough to tell you these things. It is the privilege of the old to enlist the sympathies of the young! But it was not true. I had every reason to be jealous, as had most women I ever saw, but jealousy in connection with anything so perfect as your mother, I think, was not possible. Her beauty was of the kind which disarms jealousy. It was beyond comparison or criticism. It seemed to belong to another world, and yet she was so tender to the sinners, so understanding, so full of loving kindness. Hers was a beauty of the soul as well as the body, and that beauty is as remote from the everyday prettiness as the earth is from the stars. Her expression had something of the divine in it, as if she had seen God face to face. I see the same look coming in Diana's face. Old Sir George used to say it would be worth committing a sin to be forgiven by your mother. He said her look was a benediction."
As I said good-by to Lady Mary, she held my hand and said, "Betty dear, you will some day forgive an interfering old woman, and in days to come, when you look to these distant hills, you will remember this day with a kind thought for your beautiful mother's old friend."
"Isn't Lady Mary a darling?" said Diana, as we walked home through the scented lanes on that most wonderful of summer evenings. "You look as if you had been seeing visions, Betty, quite dazed like, as Nannie used to say."
"I often see visions," I said.
"Have you been crying, Aunt Woggles?" said Hugh. "Were all the peaches gone when you got back?"
Betty slipped her little hand into mine. "You promised to let me walk with you for a little. Shall we pick honeysuckle, supposing we see any?"
"Yes, we will, darling."