"My sister was sleeping, too, at least she seemed to be trying to. Both of us, as a rule, awaken very early, but she lies still trying to get back to sleep, while I feel that it is best to get up and take advantage of the beautiful morning light. You must excuse my being en déshabillé. I did not expect to be seen."
"Oh, I think you look lovely!"
She didn't mind a bit, but blushed and patted my hand.
"I am very fond of young girls, but never see any nowadays but Claire Gaillard. She is the only one who comes to our sad old house."
"Sad! Not sad, it is too beautiful to be sad."
"It is its very beauty that seems sad to me," she sighed. "And the garden! I feel like a traitor to let it get so unkempt. I am not strong enough to keep it weeded. All I have strength to do now is to keep Grimalkin from devouring the birds. Judith thinks I am very foolish. She lays more stress on having the furniture rubbed and keeping up the inside of the house, but to me the garden and birds are more important. I'd like to see the garden looking as it used to, with trim flower beds and the dead wood all cut away."
Miss Arabella seemed to forget I was there, or to forget I was a stranger, perhaps. I am sure she had no intention of unburdening her soul to me. She closed her eyes and I knew she was picturing the garden as it had been years ago, and perhaps she was even seeing the lover of the past as he looked when she kissed him through the gate. A thought wave seemed to have gone from me to her. I no sooner put my mind on the iron gates that I felt sure must have been where the ugly board ones were now, ere she began talking of those very gates. The sun had reached the garden now, and was lifting the soft mist that hung over it like a tulle veil. I felt somehow that the veil of the past was being lifted, too, and Miss Arabella was letting me catch a glimpse of her true self.
"I hate that ugly gate," she mused. "I miss the beautiful old grille that had been there for so many years—where our friends and ancestors had come and gone so often."
"I was sure there must have been an iron gate there."
"Yes, my dear, one of the most beautiful in Charleston. We had to let something go. I thought the Stuart portrait of General Laurens would be the best, but Judith felt that the gates would be the thing to give up. She rather likes having the board ones that no one can see through. I hate them, as I like to look out on the street sometimes. The gates were very valuable, being wrought-iron of a most delicate and intricate pattern. There was hardly a spot where one could so much as get a hand through." I gasped here and had a vision of Miss Arabella, young and beautiful, trying to get her hand through and ending by finding a place where her rosy lips with some pouting could reach her lover, locked out no doubt by a stern parent. "I don't know why I should speak of these things to you, child. It would provoke sister Judith very much if she knew——"