Poor Aunt Mary.  Honora never asked her uncle such questions:  to do so never occurred to her.  At peace with all men, he gave of his best to children, and Honora remained a child.  Next to his flowers, walking was Uncle Tom’s chief recreation, and from the time she could be guided by the hand she went with him.  His very presence had the gift of dispelling longings, even in the young; the gift of compelling delight in simple things.  Of a Sunday afternoon, if the heat were not too great, he would take Honora to the wild park that stretches westward of the city, and something of the depth and intensity of his pleasure in the birds, the forest, and the wild flowers would communicate itself to her.  She learned all unconsciously (by suggestion, as it were) to take delight in them; a delight that was to last her lifetime, a never failing resource to which she was to turn again and again.  In winter, they went to the botanical gardens or the Zoo.  Uncle Tom had a passion for animals, and Mr. Isham, who was a director, gave him a pass through the gates.  The keepers knew him, and spoke to him with kindly respect.  Nay, it seemed to Honora that the very animals knew him, and offered themselves ingratiatingly to be stroked by one whom they recognized as friend.  Jaded horses in the street lifted their noses; stray, homeless cats rubbed against his legs, and vagrant dogs looked up at him trustfully with wagging tails.

Yet his goodness, as Emerson would have said, had some edge to it.  Honora had seen the light of anger in his blue eye—­a divine ray.  Once he had chastised her for telling Aunt Mary a lie (she could not have lied to him) and Honora had never forgotten it.  The anger of such a man had indeed some element in it of the divine; terrible, not in volume, but in righteous intensity.  And when it had passed there was no occasion for future warning.  The memory of it lingered.

CHAPTER III

CONCERNING PROVIDENCE

What quality was it in Honora that compelled Bridget to stop her ironing on Tuesdays in order to make hot waffles for a young woman who was late to breakfast?  Bridget, who would have filled the kitchen with righteous wrath if Aunt Mary had transgressed the rules of the house, which were like the laws of the Medes and Persians!  And in Honora’s early youth Mary Ann, the housemaid, spent more than one painful evening writing home for cockle shells and other articles to propitiate our princess, who rewarded her with a winning smile and a kiss, which invariably melted the honest girl into tears.  The Queen of Scots never had a more devoted chamber woman than old Catherine,—­who would have gone to the stake with a smile to save her little lady a single childish ill, and who spent her savings, until severely taken to task by Aunt Mary, upon objects for which a casual wish had been expressed.  The saints themselves must at times have been aweary from hearing Honora’s name.