“You do not need any,” Mr. Hammerton had once said.
One morning in December she chanced upon a bundle of old letters in one of Dinah’s drawers, they were written during the winter that she had spent in the city two years ago.
She drew one from its envelope; it was dated December 22, just two years ago to-day; she ran through it eagerly. How often she had remembered that day as an era; the beginning of the best things in her uneventful life! The second perusal was more slow. “I have seen somebody new; he is a friend of Aunt Dinah’s, or his mother is, or was. Don’t you remember that handsome house near Mayfield, just above Laura’s? When they were building it, Laura and I used to speculate as to whom it belonged, and wonder if it would make any difference to us. She said she would marry the son (for of course there would be a handsome and learned son) and that I should come to live with her forever; and Felix said that he would buy it for me, some day; you and I used to play that we owned it but that we preferred to live nearer Dunellen and had left it in charge of our housekeeper! How often when the former owner was in Europe, I have stood outside the gates and peered in and planned how happy we would all be there. Father should rest and read, and enjoy all the beautiful walks and the woods and the streams in the meadow with the rustic bridge, and mother should have a coach and four, and you and Gus and I would have it all.
“All this preamble is to introduce the fact that the somebody new is the owner of Old Place. Isn’t that an odd name? I don’t like it; I should call it Maplewood; in the autumn it is nothing but one glory of maple. His mother named it and they have become accustomed to its queerness. His mother is wintering with a relative, an invalid, I believe; I think that she has taken the invalid to Florida and the son (the father died long ago) has come to spend the winter in the city. They say he is wise and learned (I do not see any evidence of it, however), but he certainly is a veritable Tawwo Chikwo, the beauty of the world. Get out my old Lavengro and read about him.
“He is almost as dark as a gypsy, too, his eyes are the brownest and sunniest. I never saw such eyes (a sunbeam was lost one day and crept into his eyes for a home), his hair, beard, and mustache are as brown as his eyes; as brown, but not at all bright.
“He looks like a big boy, but Aunt Dinah says that he is in the neighborhood of thirty; his life has left no trace in his face, or perhaps all that brown hair covers the traces of discipline. His manner is gentleness and dignity united. But he can’t talk. Or perhaps he won’t.
“His replies (he ventures nothing else) are simple, good, kind, and above all, sincere. I have a feeling that I shall believe every word he says. That is something new for me, too. He doesn’t think much of me. He likes to hear me talk though; I have made several bright remarks for the pleasure of the sunbeam in his eyes.
“If I were his mother I should be sorry to do or say any thing to frighten it away.
“I know that he has never been in love; he could not be such a dear, grave, humorous, gentle, dignified, stupid big boy if some girl had shaken him up.
“If he were the talker that Gus Hammerton is, I should go into raptures over him. He is a doctor, too, but he has not begun practice; he has been travelling with his mother. Is it not lovely to be rich enough to do just what you like?