aunt. The old maid was of course greatly shocked and surprised, still she remembered her own youth with its mishaps, so—instead of making an outcry over spilt milk as most of our shrivelled-hearted, dried-up old virgins would have done—she tried to make the best of a bad bargain, and used all her efforts to compose her niece.
These—said she—are things which happen every day, amongst families where hysteric women, with strong imaginations and weak bodies, are like haunted houses, with shutterless windows and open doors. It is not your fatul if you were born like that and not otherwise. Now, as what is done cannot be undone, we must only patch up the whole affair as well as possible, and make as little ado as we can. Therefore leave everything to me, and you'll see that in a year's time you'll think no more of the whole matter; in the meanwhile, the less you brood over it the better.
The first thing she did was to have her niece removed to her own apartment beyond the young fellow's reach; then with the help
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