“I wish I could marry you, Peter,” she said.

He was fain to take what comfort he could from this expression of good-will.  If he was not the Prince Charming of her dreams, she would have liked him to be.  A little reflection on his part ought to have shown him the absurdity of the Prince Charming having been there all the time, and in ready-made clothes.  And he, too, may have had dreams.  We are not concerned with them.

............................

If we listen to the still, small voice of realism, intense longing is always followed by disappointment.  Nothing should have happened that summer, and Providence should not have come disguised as the postman.  It was a sultry day in early September-which is to say that it was comparatively cool—­a blue day, with occasional great drops of rain spattering on the brick walk.  And Honora was reclining on the hall sofa, reading about Mr. Ibbetson and his duchess, when she perceived the postman’s grey uniform and smiling face on the far side of the screen door.  He greeted her cordially, and gave her a single letter for Aunt Mary, and she carried it unsuspectingly upstairs.

“It’s from Cousin Eleanor,” Honora volunteered.

Aunt Mary laid down her sewing, smoothed the ruffles of her sacque, adjusted her spectacles, opened the envelope, and began to read.  Presently the letter fell to her lap, and she wiped her glasses and glanced at Honora, who was deep in her book once more.  And in Honora’s brain, as she read, was ringing the refrain of the prisoner: 

“Orleans, Beaugency! 
Notre Dame de Clery! 
Vendome!  Vendome! 
Quel chagrin, quel ennui
De compter toute la nuit
Les heures, les heures!”.

The verse appealed to Honora strangely; just as it had appealed to Ibbetson.  Was she not, too, a prisoner.  And how often, during the summer days and nights, had she listened to the chimes of the Pilgrim Church near by?

“One, two, three, four! 
One, two, three, four!”

After Uncle Tom had watered his flowers that evening, Aunt Mary followed him upstairs and locked the door of their room behind her.  Silently she put the letter in his hand.  Here is one paragraph of it: 

“I have never asked to take the child from you in the summer, because she has always been in perfect health, and I know how lonely you would have been without her, my dear Mary.  But it seems to me that a winter at Sutcliffe, with my, girls, would do her a world of good just now.  I need not point out to you that Honora is, to say the least, remarkably good looking, and that she has developed very rapidly.  And she has, in spite of the strict training you have given her, certain ideas and ambitions which seem to me, I am sorry to say, more or less prevalent among young American women these days.  You know it is only because I love her that I am so frank.  Miss Turner’s influence will, in my opinion, do much to counteract these tendencies.”

Uncle Tom folded the letter, and handed it back to his wife.