CHAPTER V
During this last month Aunt Cathie had been all that is connoted by that immense word "happy." When Lucia had come to live with her aunts a year ago, Aunt Catherine began to want, though never to get, but during this last month she had continued to want and had reaped a wonderful harvest. Lucia, of course, had been the sun and wheat of her harvesting, and the crop, as Aunt Cathie reaped it, had never ceased to grow and ripen, fresh shoots rising continually from the ground over which her sickle had passed, rising and growing tall and swelling with grain in a sort of celestial profusion unknown to naturalists.
Before the beginning of the halcyon month which dated accurately from the night when Lucia had lit all her candles in the room under the eaves, and called herself to account for what she had done, and what she had left undone, Aunt Cathie had grown almost resigned—not quite, because nobody ever gets quite resigned to anything he desires—to the nonfulfilment of her dreams. She had hoped so much for Lucia's arrival, had told herself that with this young girl in the house some aftermath of youth, anyhow, would gild its grey fields, that, as in a glass at least, she would enjoy the reflection of sunlit pictures even though the actual sun had long ago set for her. Then followed a year of disenchantment; it was as if some curse had been on them, so that instead of the house and the elderly sisters growing young, Lucia had grown old, had lost her spring, her pleasure, her elasticity. But a month ago all had changed.
Lucia became sunny, became young, became busy—such, at least, was the natural inference. Aunt Cathie, led by her, became so busy also that she had literally no time to think how busy she was, else she would surely have felt giddy, and perhaps taken sal-volatile. Always before she had felt (especially in July) that she was being driven, and that if she was not going out to tea to-day, she was sure to be doing so the day after to-morrow, and
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