"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. Camilla held in
her lap a little portfolio of papier-mache, and wrote with a little
gold pencil on sheets of gilt-edged paper. Camilla always wrote when
she sat in the arbor, but nobody ever knew what. She always carried
the finely written sheets into the house, and nobody knew where she
put them afterwards. Camilla's long, thin fingers, smooth and white
as ivory, sparkled dully with old rings. Some large amethysts in fine
gold settings she wore, one great yellow pearl, a mourning-ring of
hair in a circlet of pearls for tears, and some diamond bands in
silver, which gave out cold white lights only as her hands moved
across the gilt-edged paper.