VII
OF HAMADRYADS AND THEIR SPELLS
I
t was a golden summer that last of my youth at home, with Cousin Dove to keep us forever smiling. She was just eighteen and of that blessed temperament which loves each day for its gray or its sunny self. She coaxed Letitia out-of-doors where they walked much in the mater's garden with their arms about each other's waist. Letitia's pace was always deliberate, while Dove had the manner of a child restrained, as if some blithe and skipping step would have been more pleasant, would have matched better her restless buoyancy, her ever upturned beaming face as she confided in the elder woman—what? What do girls talk so long about? I used to marvel at them, wondering what Dove could find so merry among our currant-vines. She was a child beside Letitia. She had no memories to modulate that laughing voice of hers, no tears to quench the twin flames dancing in her eyes, and never an anxious thought in those days to cast its shadow there where her hair—red, I first called it; it was pure chestnut—brown, I mean, with the red just showing through, and wondrous soft and pretty on the margin of her fair white forehead, where it clung like tendrils of young scampering vine reddening in the April sun. Even Letitia, whose Present seemed always twilit, was tempted by-and-by into claiming something of that heritage of youth of which she had been so long deprived. From mere smiling upon her gay young cousin she fell to making little joyous venturings herself into our frolics, repartees, and harmless badinage—"midsummer madness," father called it—a sort of scarlet rash, he said, which affected persons loitering on starlit evenings on the porch or wandering under trees. He was the soul of our table banter, and after supper sat with us on the steps smoking his cigar and "devilling," as he said, "you younger caps and bells." Whom he loved he teased, after the fashion of older men, and Dove was the chief butt of that rude fondness. It was not his habit to caress, but his eyes twinkled at his fair victim.
"And to think, Dove," he was wont to say-when she had charmed him, "that Bertram here swore that you carried prayer-books and had green eyes!"
"And what did you prophesy, Uncle Weatherby?"
"I? The truth."
"And what was that?"