But Aunt Emmy had not moved mentally by a hair's-breadth. All her expansion, if expansion it could be called, had taken form in her house and garden. I had not been a week under her roof before I found that Mr. Kingston occupied exactly the same position in her life as he had done in Pembridge Square. She had brought down her romance to adorn her new home just as she had brought down _Ole Scorpio_, in cotton wool. Each had their niche. Perhaps it was unreasonable in me to expect to find her different. I had not expected it. But I had become such a totally different person myself that her attitude to life, which had appeared to me so romantic and natural when I was eighteen, now appeared irremediably pathetic, visionary, out of touch with reality. Perhaps, however, it was I who had become disillusioned and matter-of-fact. I saw with a kind of pitying wonder that her youthful romance still supplied to her, as it had done since she was nineteen, a certain atmosphere of pensive, prayerful resignation, a background for ethereal day-dreams. Her peaceful days were passed in a kind of picturesque haze, like the mist that, seeming in itself a rosy light, sometimes veils a tranquil September sunset. She was evidently very happy, but it was equally evident that she did not know it. From words she let drop now and then I saw that she still imagined she was bearing the heavy cross of her mutilated youth. But to me it seemed as if some tender hand had lifted it from her shoulder. "Aunt Emmy," I said, yielding to an ignoble curiosity in the second week of my visit, as we were picking the lavender together, "when Uncle Thomas died, I had thought I should hear of your marrying Mr. Kingston." "I also hoped it, my dear," said Aunt Emmy, snipping the lavender into a little basket, held in a loose white-gloved hand. I dared not look at her. "Mr. Kingston has not written," she said after a moment. "But did you write and tell him you were free, and still in the same mind?" "I did not. I thought it might be awkward for him in case he were--after all these years--contemplating some other possibility. I did not want to embarrass him. But your Uncle Thomas's death was in all the papers, and many of his relations are acquainted with us. I have no doubt the news reached him."