• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

‘You are changed, but still you are yourself,’ she said, approaching nearer. ‘I remember you well—your countenance, the colour of your hair, the outline of your face ...’

I had moved to the fire, and she stood opposite, and gazed into me; and as she gazed, her face became gradually more and more expressive of thought and feeling, till at last a dimness quenched her clear vision.

‘It makes me almost cry to look so far back,’ said she; ‘but as to being sorry, or sentimental, don’t think it: on the contrary, I am quite pleased and glad.’

Interested, yet altogether at fault, I knew not what to say. At last I stammered, ‘I think I never met you till that night, some weeks ago, when you were hurt ... ?’

She smiled. ‘You have forgotten then that I have sat on your knee, been lifted in your arms, even shared your pillow? You no longer remember the night when I came crying, like a naughty little child as I was, to your bedside, and you took me in? You have no memory for the comfort and protection by which you soothed an acute distress? Go back to Bretton. Remember Mr. Home.’

At last I saw it all. ‘And you are little Polly?’

‘I am Paulina Mary Home de Bassompierre.’

How time can change! Little Polly wore in her pale, small features, her fairy symmetry, her varying expression, a certain promise of interest and grace; but Paulina Mary was become beautiful—not with the beauty that strikes the eye like a rose—orbed, ruddy, and replete; not with the plump, and pink, and flaxen attributes of her blond cousin Ginevra; but her seventeen years had brought her a refined and tender charm which did not lie in complexion, though hers was fair and clear; nor in outline, though her features were sweet, and her limbs perfectly turned; but, I think, rather in a subdued glow from the soul outward. This was not an opaque vase, of material however costly, but a lamp chastely lucent, guarding from extinction, yet not hiding from worship, a flame vital and vestal. In speaking of her attractions, I would not exaggerate language; but, indeed, they seemed to me very real and engaging. What though all was on a small scale, it was the perfume which gave this white violet distinction, and made it superior to the broadest camelia—the fullest dahlia that ever bloomed.

‘Ah! and you remember the old time at Bretton?’

‘Better,’ said she, ‘better, perhaps, than you. I remember it with minute distinctness: not only the time, but the days of the time, and the hours of the days.’

‘You must have forgotten some things?’

‘Very little, I imagine.’

‘You were then a little creature of quick feelings: you must, long ere this, have outgrown the impressions with which joy and grief, affection and bereavement, stamped your mind ten years ago?’

‘You think I have forgotten whom I liked, and in what degree I liked them when a child?’

‘The sharpness must be gone—the point, the poignancy—the deep imprint must be softened away and effaced?’

‘I have a good memory for those days.’

She looked as if she had. Her eyes were the eyes of one who can remember; one whose childhood does not fade like a dream, nor whose youth vanish like a sunbeam. She would not take life, loosely and incoherently, in parts, and let one season slip as she entered on another: she would retain and add; often review from the commencement, and so grow in harmony and consistency as she grew in years. Still I could not quite admit the conviction that all the pictures which now crowded upon me were vivid and visible to her. Her fond attachments, her sports and contests with a well-loved playmate, the patient, true devotion of her child’s heart, her fears, her delicate reserves, her little trials, the last piercing pain of separation, ... I retraced these things, and shook my head incredulous. She persisted. ‘The child of seven years lives in the girl of seventeen,’ said she.

‘You used to be excessively fond of Mrs. Bretton,’ I remarked, intending to test her. She set me right at once.

‘Not excessively fond,