a, she would have felt shamed for life
had her aunt Camilla caught her toeing in, or stooping, or leaving
the "ma'am" off from her yes and no.

Camilla, this afternoon, did what Lucina had fondly hoped she might
do--proposed that they should sit out in the arbor in the garden. "I
think it is warm enough," she said; and Lucina assented with tempered
delight.

It was a very warm afternoon. Spring had taken, as she will sometimes
do in May, being apparently weary of slow advances, a sudden flight
into summer, with a wild bursting of buds and a great clamor of wings
and songs.

Miss Camilla got a yellow Canton crepe shawl, that was redolent of
sandalwood, out of a closet, but she did not put it over her
shoulders, the outdoor air was so soft. She needed nothing but her
lace mantle over her head, which made her look like a bride of some
old spring. Lucina followed her through the hall, out of the back
door, which had a trellis and a grape-vine over it, into the garden.
The garden was large, and laid out primly in box-bordered beds. There
were even trees of box on certain corners, and it looked as if the
box would in time quite choke out the flowers. Lucina, who was given
to sweet and secret fancies, would often sit with wide blue eyes of
contemplation upon the garden, and discover in the box a sprawling,
many-armed green monster, bent upon strangling out the lives of the
flowers in their beds.

"Why don't you have the box trimmed, Aunt Camilla?" she would venture
to inquire at such times; and her aunt Camilla, looking gently
askance at the flush of excitement, which she did not understand,
upon her niece's cheek, would reply:

"The box has always been there, my dear."

Long existence proved always the sacredness of a law to Miss Camilla.
She was a conservative to the bone.

The arbor where the two sat that afternoon was of the kind one sees
in old prints where lovers sit in chaste embrace under a green arch
of eglantine. However, in Miss Camilla's arbor were no lovers, and
instead of eglantine were a honeysuckle and a climbing rose. The rose
was not yet in bloom, and the honeysuckle's red trumpets were not
blown--their parts in the symphony of the spring were farther on;
over the arbor there was only a delicate prickling of new leaves,
which cast a lace-like shadow underneath. A bench ran around the
three closed sides of the arbor, and upon the bench sat Lucina and
her aunt Camilla, in her spread of lilac flounces.