“Oh, Aunt Christine, she is the most beautiful woman you ever looked upon. It was all a fib he wrote us. She is splendid and hasn’t a bit of a limp nor anything, and looks about twenty. Do get up, auntie, and go to dinner.”
Miss Rossiter was amazed, and sitting up on the side of her bed, was trying to knot her long black hair under her net, while she put some questions to Emma, when the door burst open a second time, and Godfrey himself came in full of life, and health, and vigor, and by his very presence doing more to dissipate the lady’s headache than all the drugs in her closet.
“Hallo, Aunt Christine,” he said; “done up in camphor and herbs, as usual? Let’s try what a little exercise will do for you.”
And taking her in his arms he waltzed gayly about the room, the girls laughing and the lady protesting and struggling to get free, until she had danced her hair down and a bright color into her face.
“There, auntie, you are real handsome now,” Godfrey said, as he released her with a hearty kiss, and leading her to the couch, seated himself beside her, with his arm around her waist. “Now, girls, pitch in; I’m ready for you,” he said; as they began to accuse him of deceit in its most aggravating form, asking how he could do it.
“Do what?” he asked. “What are you making such a fuss about?”
“I should think you’d ask,” Julia replied. “Telling us she was forty and had a glass eye, and a squawk in her voice, and everything else that is bad.”
“I never told you any such thing,” Godfrey answered, with great gravity; and the three girls exclaimed, in chorus:
“Oh, Godfrey Schuyler! You did, you did. We have the letter. You wrote, ‘Think of father’s marrying a woman of forty with a glass eye, and——’”
“Oh, yes, well, of course, that’s a different thing,” Godfrey replied. “I did tell you to think of it, I know, and you evidently have thought of it, and had a good time at it, but I never said it was so. I told you ‘she would take your breath away when you saw her,’ and she did. You all three opened your eyes and mouths and stared at her as if you never saw a handsome woman before. And she is handsome, isn’t she? Now, confess it, girls; and say she is the loveliest creature you ever saw——”