“If I thought this stocking was really to grace a fool's leg”—and Aunt Frances feigned great seriousness—“not another stitch would I take; but, begging your pardon, you would have been a fool indeed if you had not told me about all this, although I perfectly understand that your motives for not telling me were anything but foolish. No, Harry; somehow I am sure it is only providential that you should have heard of this place. Promise to try for it.”
“I promise,” and Harry's lightened heart unconsciously betrayed itself in voice and look. He had wanted the situation, oh! so much, more than he would admit even to himself, but he had decided he must forego any attempt to secure it. It would be, he thought, at too great a cost to Aunt Frances's feelings, and he simply must not ask it.
“Look, Harry,” she said, shading her eyes with one hand, “isn't that the Boniface boat about a mile to the left of the point?”
“Yes, it is,” Harry answered, merely glancing in that direction; “but tell me one thing before I go down to the wharf: tell me, Aunt Frances, do you think Colonel Hamilton an unprincipled man?”
“Unprincipled! Why, Harry, do you suppose for a single moment that I would urge you to seek a situation under him if I thought that? No, I believe that he honestly felt that the English ought to be allowed to keep possession of the houses that we had abandoned, and so perhaps it was only natural that when Captain Wadsworth took his case to him, he should bring all his eloquence, which is very great, to bear on that side of the question. Nevertheless I confess, as that eloquence cost me my home, I cannot but feel pretty sore about it, and would go a long way out of my way to avoid meeting him, brave officer and brilliant lawyer as he is.”
Harry felt considerably relieved by this assertion, and strolled down to the boat-landing with even more admiration for “darling old Aunt Frances” than he had ever felt before. It was so unusual, he thought, to find a woman who could reason fairly, independent of her heart.
But Aunt Frances was not quite so 'independent of her heart,' as Harry put it, as Harry and the rest of the world thought, and for the very good reason that her heart was as big as herself. And so when Harry had left her, what did she do but lay aside her knitting, go straight up to her own little room in one of the gable ends of the house, shut the door of it, and then, sitting down in a low little rocking-chair, bury her face in her hands and cry. It had not been by any means an easy thing for her to urge Harry to seek a position under a man who had wrought her so much harm, but it had been her plain duty, at whatever cost to herself, and she had done it. Now when Aunt Frances cried, it was because that great heart of hers had had one little ache crowded upon another little ache till it could bear no more, and then the hot tears must (there was no choice at all in the matter) be allowed to flow for a while and ease it. But for all this, do not think for a moment that Aunt Frances was an unhappy sort of person. Each little experience of her life and of the lives of others had a very deep significance for her, because she believed with all her heart that God watches over every life and guides it, and no one who believes that can ever be unhappy long at a time; life is to them too beautiful and earnest. But this was the way of it with Aunt Frances: she had a great capacity for loving, if you understand what that means, but she did not have as much of a chance to spend that love as many another, who had not half as much to spend. She would always be Miss Frances Avery, she felt sure of that; yet what a tender, loving wife she could have made for somebody! She should never have any one nearer to her than Harry and Starlight (bless their hearts!) but oh, what a mother she might have been with her great passionate love for little children! And so it was that Aunt Frances trod the round of the life God had sent her, because He had sent it, contentedly and happily, and yet it would happen now and then that some thoughtless word or deed would almost unaccountably set one little spot to aching, and something else would set another, till her heart was all one great ache, and the pent-up tears must come. Aunt Frances could always tell perfectly well when there was need to retreat to the little room in the gable, the little room that had been hers now, for the two years since she had fled from her own home across the river; and while she sat there on the step with Harry she knew well enough what she should do the moment he was gone. It was not that she did not mean every word she said to him; it was only that somehow that little talk had overcharged the brave heart.
Afterward, when the Boniface's boat had touched at the dock and all the Van Vleets were flocking out of doors to welcome them, Aunt Frances was in their midst, with the sunshine of her presence all the brighter for the storm of troubled feelings that had just swept over it, but Josephine Boniface thought she saw just the faintest trace of recent tears in Aunt Frances's eyes as she stooped to kiss her. “Dear old Aunt Frances,” she whispered, as she put her arm about her neck, “I would give all the world ever to be such a blessed ministering angel as you are to everybody.
“Why, Josephine, darling, what foolishness,” whispered Aunt Frances; but it needed only those few sweet words to banish even the trace of tears, and to make her thoroughly light-hearted once again.