I don’t love her now.  I don’t think of her once in five years; and yet it would give me a turn if in the course of my daily walk I should suddenly come upon her eldest boy.  I may say that her eldest boy was not playing a prominent part in this life when I first made her acquaintance.

It was a drizzling, cheerless afternoon towards the end of summer that a hack drew up at the door of the Nutter House.  The Captain and Miss Abigail hastened into the hall on hearing the carriage stop.  In a moment more Miss Nelly Glentworth was seated in our sitting-room undergoing a critical examination at the hands of a small boy who lounged uncomfortably on a settee between the windows.

The small boy considered himself a judge of girls, and he rapidly came to the following conclusions:  That Miss Nelly was about nineteen; that she had not given away much of her back hair, which hung in two massive chestnut braids over her shoulders; that she was a shade too pale and a trifle too tall; that her hands were nicely shaped and her feet much too diminutive for daily use.  He furthermore observed that her voice was musical, and that her face lighted up with an indescribable brightness when she smiled.

On the whole, the small boy liked her well enough; and, satisfied that she was not a person to be afraid of, but, on the contrary, one who might be made quite agreeable, he departed to keep an appointment with his friend Sir Pepper Whitcomb.

But the next morning when Miss Glentworth came down to breakfast in a purple dress, her face as fresh as one of the moss-roses on the bureau upstairs, and her laugh as contagious as the merriment of a robin, the small boy experienced a strange sensation, and mentally compared her with the loveliest of Miss Gibbs’s young ladies, and found those young ladies wanting in the balance.

A night’s rest had wrought a wonderful change in Miss Nelly.  The pallor and weariness of the journey had passed away.  I looked at her through the toast-rack and thought I had never seen anything more winning than her smile.

After breakfast she went out with me to the stable to see Gypsy, and the three of us became friends then and there.  Nelly was the only girl that Gypsy ever took the slightest notice of.

It chanced to be a half-holiday, and a baseball match of unusual interest was to come off on the school ground that afternoon; but, somehow, I didn’t go.  I hung about the house abstractedly.  The Captain went up town, and Miss Abigail was busy in the kitchen making immortal gingerbread.  I drifted into the sitting-room, and had our guest all to myself for I don’t know how many hours.  It was twilight, I recollect, when the Captain returned with letters for Miss Nelly.

Many a time after that I sat with her through the dreamy September afternoons.  If I had played baseball it would have been much better for me.

Those first days of Miss Nelly’s visit are very misty in my remembrance.  I try in vain to remember just when I began to fall in love with her.  ’Whether the spell worked upon me gradually or fell upon me all at once, I don’t know.  I only know that it seemed to me as if I had always loved her.  Things that took place before she came were dim to me, like events that had occurred in the Middle Ages.