However, she was in no hurry to take advantage of her aunt’s permission.  She sat quietly in the warm and pleasant arbor, holding her doll-baby, with the afternoon sun sifting through the young leaves, and making over them a shifting dapple like golden water, and felt no inclination to stir.  The spring languor was over even her young limbs; the sweet twitter of birds, the gathering bird-like flutter of leaves before a soft swell of air, the rustle of her aunt’s gilt-edged paper, an occasional hiss of her silken flounces, grew dim and confused.  Lucina, as well as her doll, fell asleep, leaning her pretty head against the arbor trellis-work.  Camilla did not disturb her; she had never in her life disturbed the peace or the slumber of any soul.  She only gazed at her now and then, with gentle, half-abstracted affection, then wrote again.

Presently, stepping with that subtlest silence of motion through the quiet garden, came a great yellow cat.  She rubbed against Miss Camilla’s knees with that luxurious purr of love and comfort which is itself a completest slumber song, then made a noiseless leap to a sunny corner of the bench, and settled herself there in a yellow coil of sleep.  Presently there came another, and another, and another still—­all great cats, and all yellow, marked in splendid tiger stripes, with eyes like topaz—­until there were four of them, all asleep on the sunny side of the arbor.  Miss Camilla’s yellow cats were of a famous breed, well represented in the village; but she had these four, which were marvels of beauty.

Another hour wore on.  Miss Camilla still wrote, and Lucina and the yellow cats slept.  Then it was four o’clock, and time for the entertainment to which Lucina had looked forward.

There was a heavy footstep on the garden walk and a rustling among the box borders.  Then old ’Liza loomed up in the arbor door, darkening out the light.  Little Lucina stirred and woke, yet did not know she woke, not knowing she had slept.  To her thinking she had sat all this time with her eyes wide open, and the sight of her aunt Camilla writing and the leaf shadows on the arbor floor had never left them.  She saw the yellow cats with some surprise, but cats can steal in quietly when one’s eyes are turned.  Had Lucina dreamed she had fallen asleep when an honored guest of her lady aunt, she would have been ready to sink with shame.  Blindness to one’s innocent shortcomings seems sometimes a special mercy of Providence.

Lucina straightened herself with a flushed smile, gave just one glance at the great tray which old ’Liza bore before her; then looked away again, being fully alive to the sense that it is not polite nor ladylike to act as if you thought much of your eating and drinking.

Old ’Liza set the tray on a little table in the midst of the arbor, and immediately odors, at once dainty and delicate, spicy, fruity, and aromatically soothing, diffused themselves about.  The four yellow cats stirred; they yawned, and stretched luxuriously; then, suddenly fully awake to the meaning of those savory scents which had disturbed their slumbers, sat upright with eager jewel eyes upon the tray.