"Tom will give him my address," said Aunt Emmy faintly. "I wonder how he
knows I am not living there now. _He will--arrive here--to-day._"
She looked straight in front of her through the open windows to the
hollyhocks basking in the still September sunshine. A radiance lit up
her face, like that which perhaps shone on Christian's when at last
across the river he saw the pearl gates of the New Jerusalem.
"At last!" she said. "After all these years! After all these dreadful,
dreadful years!"
An unbearable pain went through me. It was not new to me. I had known it
once before, when I had seen my child sicken. Why did it return now?
The radiance passed. A pitiful trembling shook her like a leaf. Her eyes
turned helplessly to mine, frightened and dimmed.
"I forgot I am an old woman," she said.
I kissed her hand. I told her that she was handsomer than any one. She
was very dignified and gentle.
"You are very kind to me, my dear, and it is sweet of you to feel as you
do. I believe, as you say, that I am still nice-looking. But the fact
remains that it is nearly twenty-five years since we have seen each
other. I was nineteen then. And oh! I suppose I ought not to say it, but
I _was_ pretty. People turned to look at me in the street. And now I am
forty-four."
"But he is older than you, isn't he?"
"Two years. What is two years! We were the same age when we were young.
But a man of forty-six is younger than a woman of forty-four."