Sixty years ago Aunt Griselda had had her romance, and she still kept her love-letters tied up with discoloured ribbons and laid away in the cedar chest.  It was but the skeleton of a love story—­the adolescent ardours of a high-spirited country girl and the high-spirited son of a neighbouring farmer.  When the quarrel came the letters were overlooked when the ring went back.  Griselda Grigsby had tossed them carelessly into the cedar chest and gone out to forget them.  Her heart had not been deeply touched and it soon mended.  No other lovers came, and she lived her quiet life in her father’s house, gathering garden flowers for the great, blue bowls in the parlour, teaching the catechism to small black slaves, and making stiff, old-fashioned samplers in crewels.  The high-spirited lover had loved elsewhere and died of a fever, and, beyond a passing regret, she thought little of him.  There were nearer interests, and she was still the petted daughter of her father’s house—­the eldest and the best beloved.  Then the crash came.  The old people passed away, the house changed hands, Aunt Griselda was stranded upon the high tide of hospitality—­and crewel work went out of fashion.

In her sister’s home she became a constant guest—­one to be offered the favoured share and to be treated with tender, increasing tolerance—­not to be loved.  Since the death of her parents none had loved her, though many had borne gently with her spoiled fancies.  But her coming in had brought no light, and her going out had left nothing dark.  She was old and ill-tempered and bitter of speech, and, though all doors opened hospitably at her approach, all closed quickly when she was gone.  Her spoiled youth had left her sensitive to trivial stings, unforgivable to fancied wrongs.  In a childish oversight she detected hidden malice and implacable hate in a thoughtless jest.  Her bitterness and her years waxed greater together, and she lost alike her youth and her self-control.  When she had yearned for passionate affection she had found kindly tolerance, and the longings of her hidden nature, which none knew, were expressed in rasping words and acrid tears.  Once, some years after Bernard’s birth, she had called him into her room as she sat among her relics, and had shown him the daguerreotype.

“It’s pitty lady,” the child had lisped, and she had caught him suddenly to her lean old breast, but he had broken into peevish cries and struggled free, tearing with his foot the ruffle of the swiss muslin gown.

“Oo ain’t pitty lady,” he had said, and Aunt Griselda had risen and pushed him into the hall with sharp, scolding words, and had sat down to darn the muslin ruffle with delicate, old-fashioned stitches.

It was only when all living love had failed her that she returned to the dead.  She had gathered the letters of nearly sixty years ago from the bottom of the cedar chest, reading them through her spectacles with bleared, watery eyes.  Those subtle sentimentalities which linger like aromas in a heart too aged for passion were liberated by the bundle of yellow scrawls written by hands that were dust.  As she sat in her stiff bombazine skirts beside the opened chest, peering with worry-ravaged face at the old letters, she forgot that she was no longer one with the girl in the muslin frock, and that the inciter of this exuberant emotion was as dead as the emotion itself.