s.

As we entered the room, they rose slightly from their chairs, and turned
toward us with an expression of mild surprise on their faces. It was
impossible, I knew, for their delicately moulded features to express any
impulse more strongly.

"Dear aunties," began Sally, in a voice that was a caress, "I've brought
Ben back with me because I met him in the garden on Church
Hill--and--and--and he told me that he loved me."

"He told you that he loved you?" repeated Miss Mitty in a high voice,
while Miss Matoaca sat speechless, with her unnaturally bright eyes on
her niece's face.

Kneeling on the rug at their feet, Sally looked from one to the other
with an appealing and tender glance.

"You brought him back because he told you that he loved you?" said Miss
Mitty again, as if her closed mind had refused to admit the words she
had uttered.

"Well, only partly because of that, Aunt Mitty," replied Sally bravely,
"the rest was because--because I told him that I loved him."

For a moment there was a tense and unnatural silence in the midst of
which I heard the sharp crackling of the fire and smelt the faint sweet
smell of the burning cedar. The two aunts looked at each other over the
kneeling girl, and it seemed to me that the long, narrow faces had grown
suddenly pinched and old.

"I--I don't think we understood quite what you said, Sally dear," said
Miss Matoaca, in a hesitating voice; and I felt sorry for her as she
spoke--sorry for them both because the edifice of their beliefs and
traditions, reared so patiently through the centuries by dead Fairfaxes
and Blands, had crumbled about their ears.

"What she means, Miss Matoaca," I said gently, coming forward into the
firelight, "is that I have asked her to marry me."

"To marry you--you--Ben Starr?" exclaimed Miss Mitty abruptly, rising
from her chair, and then falling nervelessly back. "There is some
mistake--not that I doubt," she added courteously, the generations of
breeding overcoming her raw impulse of horror, "not that I doubt for a
minute that you are an estimable and deserving character--General
Bolingbroke tells me so and I trust his word. But Sally marry you! Why,
your father--I beg your pardon for reminding you of it--your father was
not even an educated man."

"No," I replied, "my father was not an educated man, but I am."

"That speaks very well for you, sir, I am sure--but how--how could my
niece marry a man who--I apologise again for alluding