"The Sultana arrived yesterday," I said.
I looked at the envelope. It was directed on from Pembridge Square.
"Tom will give him my address," said Aunt Emmy faintly. "I wonder how he knows I am not living there now. He will—arrive here—to-day."
She looked straight in front of her through the open windows to the hollyhocks basking in the still September sunshine. A radiance lit up her face, like that which perhaps shone on Christian's when at last across the river he saw the pearl gates of the New Jerusalem.
"At last!" she said. "After all these years! After all these dreadful, dreadful years!"
An unbearable pain went through me. It was not new to me. I had known it once before, when I had seen my child sicken. Why did it return now?
The radiance passed. A pitiful trembling shook her like a leaf. Her eyes turned helplessly to mine, frightened and dimmed.
"I forgot I am an old woman," she said.
I kissed her hand. I told her that she was handsomer than any one. She was very dignified and gentle.
"You are very kind to me, my dear, and it is sweet of you to feel as you do. I believe, as you say, that I am still nice-looking. But the fact remains that it is nearly twenty-five years since we have seen each other. I was nineteen then. And oh! I suppose I ought not to say it, but I was pretty. People turned to look at me in the street. And now I am forty-four."