The afternoon was a warm one, and she easily induced, as she had hoped, her Aunt Camilla to sit in the summer-house in the garden.  Everything was very little changed from that old summer afternoon of years ago.  If Miss Camilla had altered, it had been with such a fine conservation of general effect, in spite of varying detail, that the alteration was scarcely visible.  She wore the same softly spreading lilac gown, she wrote on her portfolio with the same gold pencil presumably the same thoughts.  If her softly drooping curls were faded and cast lighter shadows over thinner cheeks, one could more easily attribute the dimness and thinness to the lack of one’s own memory than to change in her.

The garden was the same, sweetening with the ardor of pinks and mignonette, the tasted breaths of thyme and lavender, like under-thoughts of reason, and the pungent evidence of box.

Lucina looked out of the green gloom of the summer-house at the same old carnival of flowers, swarming as lightly as if untethered by stems, upon wings of pink and white and purpling blue, blazing out to sight as with a very rustle of color from the hearts of green bushes and the sides of tall green-sheathed stalks, in spikes and plumes, and soft rosettes of silken bloom.  Even the yellow cats of Miss Camilla’s famous breed, inheriting the love of their ancestors for following the steps of their mistress, came presently between the box rows with the soft, sly glide of the jungle, and established themselves for a siesta on the arbor bench.

Lucina was glad that it was all so like what it had been, even to the yellow cats, seeming scarcely more than a second rendering of a tune, and it made it possible for her to open truthfully and easily upon her plan.  She herself, whose mind was so changed from its old childish habit of simple outlook and waiting into personal effort for its own ends, and whose body was so advanced in growth of grace, was perhaps the most altered of all.  However, there was much of the child left in her.

“Aunt Camilla,” said she, in almost the same tone of timid deprecation which the little Lucina of years before might have used.

Camilla looked up, with gentle inquiry, from her portfolio.

“I have been thinking,” said Lucina, bending low over her embroidery that her aunt might not see the pink confusion of her face, which she could not, after all, control, “how I came here and spent the afternoon, once, years ago; do you remember?”

“You came here often—­did you not, dear?”

“Yes,” said Lucina, “but that once in particular, Aunt Camilla?”

“I fear I do not remember, dear,” said Camilla, whose past had been for years a peaceful monotone as to her own emotions, and had so established a similar monotone of memory.

“Don’t you remember, Aunt Camilla?  I came first with a stent to knit on a garter, and we sat out here.  Then the yellow cats came, and father had been fishing, and he brought some speckled trout, and—­then—­the Edwards boy—­”