shouldn’t have written those things—but I wrote them when I was vexed—and I didn’t mean them all—truly, I didn’t mean the worst of them. Oh, you’ll believe that, won’t you, Aunt Elizabeth?”
“I’d like to believe it, Emily.” An odd quiver passed through the tall, rigid form. “I—don’t like to think you—hate me—my sister’s child—little Juliet’s child.”
“I don’t—oh, I don’t,” sobbed Emily. “And I’ll love you, Aunt Elizabeth, if you’ll let me—if you want me to. I didn’t think you cared. Dear Aunt Elizabeth.”
Emily gave Aunt Elizabeth a fierce hug and a passionate kiss on the white, fine-wrinkled cheek. Aunt Elizabeth kissed her gravely on the brow in return and then said, as if closing the door on the whole incident,
“You’d better wash your face and come down to supper.”
But there was yet something to be cleared up.
“Aunt Elizabeth,” whispered Emily. “I can’t burn those letters, you know—they belong to Father. But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll go over them all and put a star by anything I said about you and then I’ll add an explanatory footnote saying that I was mistaken.”
Emily spent her spare time for several days putting in her “explanatory footnotes,” and then her conscience had rest. But when she again tried to write a letter to her father she found that it no longer meant anything to her. The sense of reality—nearness—of close communion had gone. Perhaps she had been outgrowing it gradually, as childhood began to merge into girlhood—perhaps the bitter scene with Aunt Elizabeth had only shaken into dust something out of which the spirit had already departed. But, whatever the explanation, it was not possible to write such letters any more. She missed them terribly but she could not go back to them. A certain door of life was shut behind her and could not be re-opened.
