"Why, I said you were an angel, though a little frolicsome perhaps, and with beautiful auburn hair. Did I not, my son?"
"No, sir. You thought she would be a tomboy with red—"
"Precisely," he would interrupt. "You see, my dear, how in every particular I am corroborated by my son."
Into these quiet family tournaments, Letitia, as I have said, was slowly drawn, but it was a new world to her and she was timid in it. Doctor Primrose had been endowed with wit, even with a quiet, subtle humor in which his daughter shared, but beneath their lighter moments there had flowed always an undercurrent of that sad gravity which tinged their lives together. If they were playful in each other's company, it was out of pity for each other's lot, his in his chair, hers by its side, rather than because they could not help the jest. It was meant to cheer each other—that kind of tender gayety which, however fanciful, however smiling, ends where it begins—in tears unshed. Waters in silent woodland fountains, all untouched by a single gleam from the sky above the boughs, lose sometimes their darker hues and turn to amber beneath the fallen leaves—but they are never golden like the meadow pools; they never flash and sparkle in the sun.
Letitia was not yet thirty; life stretched years before her yet; so, coaxed by Cousin Dove and me, she gave her hands to us, half-delighted, half-afraid. Here now, at last, were holidays, games, tricks, revels, the mummery and masque, the pipe and tabor—all the rosy carnival of youth. Her eyes kindled, her heart beat faster as we led her on—but at the first romp failed her. It was beautiful, she pleaded—only let her smile upon it as from a balcony—she could not dance—she had never learned our songs.
We did not urge her. She sat with the mater and smiled gladly upon our mirth. In all the frolics of that happy summer her eyes were always on Cousin Dove, as if, watching, she were thinking to herself—enviously, often sadly, I have no doubt, but through it all lovingly and with a kind of pride in that grace and flowerness—
"There is the girl I might have been."
Dove, even when she seemed the very spirit of our effervescence, kept always a certain letter of that lovely quaintness which her name implied. She was a dove, the mater said, reminding us for the hundredth time of her old prediction—a dove always, even among the magpies; meaning, I suppose, father and myself.
It was not all play that summer. I was to enter college in the fall, and I labored at exercises, helped not a little by a voice still saying:
"That's right, my boy. Remember what Dr. Primrose said when he gave you Horace."