"You will always be to me just what you have been, Aunt Mary," I replied, and tears filled my eyes, as I threw myself upon a low seat at her feet. "You must not think that because I am a wife, I shall love my old friends any the less: and you of all others, you who have been to me as a dear, dear elder sister,--you who have instructed and counselled me, and have shared all my thoughts and feelings since I was a little child; oh! do you think any one can come between our hearts? We may not meet as frequently as we have done, but you will ever find me just the same, and I shall tell you all my thoughts, and all my cares and sorrows, and all my joys too, just as I always have done." "No, no, Jessie, say not so. That may not be. You may love me just as well, but you will love another more. Your heart _cannot_ be open to me as it has been, for it will belong to another. Its hopes, its fears, its joys, its sorrows, its cares, its love, will all be so intimately blended with those of another, that they cannot be separated. No wife, provided the relations existing between her husband and herself are what they should be, can be to _any_ other friend exactly what she was before her marriage." "Why, Aunt Mary!--you surely do not mean to say that a wife should never have any confidential friends?" "The history of woman, dear Jessie, is generally simply a record of the workings of her own heart; in ordinary cases, she has little else to consider. 'The world of the affections is her world,' and there finds she her appropriate sphere of action. What I mean to say is,--not that a wife should have no friend save her husband,--but that, if the hearts of the twain are as closely linked together as they should be, if they always beat in perfect unison, and if their thoughts and feelings harmonize as they ought to do, it will be difficult for her to draw aside the veil from her own heart, and lay it open to the gaze of any other being, without, in some degree, betraying the confidence reposed in her by him who should be nearer and dearer than all the world beside. The heart is like a temple, Jessie. It has its outer and its inner court, and it has also its holy of holies. The outer court is full: common acquaintances,--those that we call friends, merely because they are not enemies,--are gathered there. The inner court but few may enter,--the few who we feel love us, and to whom we are united by the strong bonds of sympathy; but the sanctum sanctorum, the holy of holies, that must never be profaned by alien footsteps, or by the tread of any, save him to whom the wife hath said, 'Whither thou goest I will go, thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.'" The deepening twilight hung over us, wrapping all things in its sombre mantle, and its solemn stillness fell with soft, subduing power upon our hearts, as we sat, for many moments, each lost in reverie, ere I spoke again. "Aunt Mary, why were you never married?"