Camilla Merritt was far from young, being much older than her brother, Lucina’s father; but she was old as a poem or an angel might be, with the lovely meaning of her still uppermost and most evident.  Camilla in her youth had been of a rare and delicate beauty, which had given her fame throughout the country-side, and she held the best of it still, as one holds jewels in a worn casket, and as a poem written in obsolete language contains still its first grace of thought.  Camilla’s soft and slender body had none of those stiff, distorted lines which come from resistance to the forced attitudes of life.  Her body and her soul had been amenable to all discipline.  She had leaned sweetly against her crosses, instead of straining away from them with fierce cramps and agonies of resistance.  In every motion she had the freedom of utter yielding, which surpasses the freedom of action.  Camilla’s graduated flounces of lilac silk, slightly faded, having over it a little spraying mist of gray, trimmed her full skirt to her slender waist, girdled with a narrow ribbon fastened with a little clasp set with amethysts.  A great amethyst brooch pinned the lace at her throat.  She wore a lace cap, and over that, flung loosely, draping her shoulders and shading her face with its soft mesh, a great shawl or veil of fine white lace wrought with sprigs.  Camilla’s delicately spare cheeks were softly pink, with that elderly bloom which lacks the warm dazzle of youth, yet has its own late beauty.  Her eyes were blue and clear as a child’s, and as full of innocent dreams—­only of the past instead of the future.  Her blond hair, which in turning gray had got a creamy instead of a silvery lustre, like her old lace, was looped softly and disposed in half-curls over her ears.  When she smiled it was with the grace and fine dignity of ineffable ladyhood, and yet with the soft ignorance, though none of the abandon, of childhood.  Camilla was like a child whose formal code and manners of life had been fully prescribed and learned, but whose vital copy had not been quite set.

Lucina loved her aunt Camilla with a strange sense of comradeship, and yet with awe.  “If you can ever be as much of a lady as your aunt Camilla, I shall be glad,” her mother often told her.  Camilla was to Lucina the personification of the gentle and the genteel.  She was her ideal, the model upon which she was to form herself.

Camilla was so unceasingly punctilious in all the finer details of living that all who infringed upon them felt her mere presence a reproach.  Children were never rough or loud-voiced or naughty when Miss Camilla was near, though she never admonished otherwise than by example.  As for little Lucina, she would have felt shamed for life had her aunt Camilla caught her toeing in, or stooping, or leaving the “ma’am” off from her yes and no.

Camilla, this afternoon, did what Lucina had fondly hoped she might do—­proposed that they should sit out in the arbor in the garden.  “I think it is warm enough,” she said; and Lucina assented with tempered delight.