"Aunt Deborah," I said one morning, as I found her seated in the
embrasure of the breakfast room window crocheting, "Aunt Deborah! You
love the sunlight, do you not?"
She turned on me a startled face. "What makes you ask such strange
questions, child?" she said. "Of course I like the--sun. Most people
do. It is no uncommon thing, especially at my age."
"But the sunbeams do not follow every one, auntie, do they?" I
persisted.
Miss Deborah's crochet fell into her lap.
"How queerly you talk," she said, with a curious trembling of her
lips. "How can the sunbeams follow one?"
"But they do, auntie, they do indeed!" I cried. "I have often watched
a bright beam of golden light follow Aunt Amelia and you, in
different parts of the room. And it has settled on your lace collar
now."
Miss Deborah looked at me very seriously; but the moistening of her
eyes I attributed to the strong light. "Esther," she said, laying one
of her soft hands on my forehead, "there are things God does not want
little girls to understand--question me no more."
I obeyed, but henceforth I felt more than ever assured that my aunts,
consciously or unconsciously, shared their charming abode with some
capricious genii, of whose presence in their midst I had become
accidentally aware; and to find out the enchanted neighbourhood of its
mysterious retreat was to me now a matter of all-absorbing importance.
I spent hour after hour roaming through the corridors, the copses, and
my beloved flower gardens, in eager search of some spot I could
unhesitatingly affirm was the home of the genii.
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