It was a very warm afternoon.  Spring had taken, as she will sometimes do in May, being apparently weary of slow advances, a sudden flight into summer, with a wild bursting of buds and a great clamor of wings and songs.

Miss Camilla got a yellow Canton crepe shawl, that was redolent of sandalwood, out of a closet, but she did not put it over her shoulders, the outdoor air was so soft.  She needed nothing but her lace mantle over her head, which made her look like a bride of some old spring.  Lucina followed her through the hall, out of the back door, which had a trellis and a grape-vine over it, into the garden.  The garden was large, and laid out primly in box-bordered beds.  There were even trees of box on certain corners, and it looked as if the box would in time quite choke out the flowers.  Lucina, who was given to sweet and secret fancies, would often sit with wide blue eyes of contemplation upon the garden, and discover in the box a sprawling, many-armed green monster, bent upon strangling out the lives of the flowers in their beds.

“Why don’t you have the box trimmed, Aunt Camilla?” she would venture to inquire at such times; and her aunt Camilla, looking gently askance at the flush of excitement, which she did not understand, upon her niece’s cheek, would reply: 

“The box has always been there, my dear.”

Long existence proved always the sacredness of a law to Miss Camilla.  She was a conservative to the bone.

The arbor where the two sat that afternoon was of the kind one sees in old prints where lovers sit in chaste embrace under a green arch of eglantine.  However, in Miss Camilla’s arbor were no lovers, and instead of eglantine were a honeysuckle and a climbing rose.  The rose was not yet in bloom, and the honeysuckle’s red trumpets were not blown—­their parts in the symphony of the spring were farther on; over the arbor there was only a delicate prickling of new leaves, which cast a lace-like shadow underneath.  A bench ran around the three closed sides of the arbor, and upon the bench sat Lucina and her aunt Camilla, in her spread of lilac flounces.  Camilla held in her lap a little portfolio of papier-mache, and wrote with a little gold pencil on sheets of gilt-edged paper.  Camilla always wrote when she sat in the arbor, but nobody ever knew what.  She always carried the finely written sheets into the house, and nobody knew where she put them afterwards.  Camilla’s long, thin fingers, smooth and white as ivory, sparkled dully with old rings.  Some large amethysts in fine gold settings she wore, one great yellow pearl, a mourning-ring of hair in a circlet of pearls for tears, and some diamond bands in silver, which gave out cold white lights only as her hands moved across the gilt-edged paper.