"I daresay he would. I think he said something about it," she said apathetically.
I remembered a beautiful sentence I had read in a novel about confidences being mutual, and I said reproachfully, "Aunt Emmy, I have told you all about Lord K——; won't you tell me, just me, no one else—about Mr. Kingston?"
And she told me. I think it was a relief to speak to some one. I held my cheek against her hand all the time. It seemed that a sort of demigod of the name of Kingston had alighted in her life when she was nineteen (I felt with a pang that I had still a whole year to wait) and he was twenty-one. Aunt Emmy waxed boldly eloquent in her description of his unique and heroic character, shyly eloquent in her dispassionate indication of his almost terrifying beauty.
I think Aunt Emmy became a girl in her teens again for a few minutes, carried away by her memory, and by the idolising sympathy of the other girl in her teens at her feet in a seventh heaven at being a confidant. But in one sense, on the sentimental plane, she had never ceased to be a girl. She and I viewed the situation almost from the same standpoint.
"Aunt Emmy, was he tall?"
"He was, my love."
"And slender?"
My whole life hung in the balance. I had all a young girl's repulsion towards stout men.
"He was thin and wiry, and very athletic, a great rider."
I gave a sigh of relief.