“It makes me very happy, Kate,” said she one day, “to have found my cousin and friend again.  I am glad to feel that friendships springing from the pure and good feelings of the heart are not so transient as I have sometimes been tempted to think them.  They may be buried for years under a drift of new interests; but give them air, and they will live again.”

“What is that remark of Byron about young ladies’ friendship?  Take care, take care!” said I, shaking my head, gravely; “receive the warning of a calm observer!”

“Oh, no, Kate! this visit is but a little green oasis in the desert.  In a day or two we shall separate, probably forever; but both, I doubt not, will be happier through life for this brief reunion.  His plan is to make his future residence in France.”

At the end of the week our kinsman left us for a fortnight’s visit to the metropolis.  Intending to give us a call on his return south, he willingly complied with our desire to leave his little girl with us.  As we were sitting together in my aunt’s room after his departure, the child brought her a small packet which her father had intrusted to her.  “I believe,” said the little smiler, “he said it was a story for you to read.  Won’t you please to read it to me?” She took it with a look of surprise and curiosity, and immediately opened it and began to read.  But her color soon began to vary, her hand trembled, and presently laying down the sheets in her lap, she sat lost in thought.

“It seems a moving story!” I remarked, dryly.

“Kate, this is the strangest affair!—­But I can’t tell you now; I must read it first alone.”

She left the room, and I heard the key turn in the lock as she entered another chamber.  In about an hour she came out very composedly, and said nothing more on the subject.

After our little guest was asleep at night, I could restrain myself no longer.  “You are treating me shabbily, aunty,” said I.  “See if I am ever a good girl again to please you!”

“You shall know it all, Katy; I only wished to think it over first by myself.  There, take the letter; but make no note or comment till I mention it again.”

* * * * *

The letter of Cousin Harry seemed to me rather matter-of-fact, I must confess, till near the end, where he spoke of a little nosegay which he enclosed, and which would speak to her of dear old times.

“But where is the nosegay, aunty?”

With a beautiful flush, as if the sunset of that vanished day were reddening the sky of memory, she drew a small packet from her bosom, and in it I found a withered rose-bud tied up with a shrivelled sprig of mignonette.

I am afraid that my Aunt Linny’s answer was a great deal more proper than I should have wished; and yet, with all its emphatic expressions of duty towards her father and the impossibility of leaving him, there must have been something between the lines which I could not read.  I have since discovered that all such epistles have their real meaning concealed in some kind of more rarefied sympathetic ink, which betrays itself only under the burning hands of a lover.