Her thought spoke aloud. "Were you ever in love, aunt?" she asked.
Her aunt glanced up startled, and then sat very still, with hands that had ceased to work. "What makes you ask such a question, Vee?" she said.
"I wondered."
Her aunt answered in a low voice: "I was engaged to him, dear, for seven years, and then he died."
Ann Veronica made a sympathetic little murmur.
"He was in holy orders, and we were to have been married when he got a living. He was a Wiltshire Edmondshaw, a very old family."
She sat very still.
Ann Veronica hesitated with a question that had leaped up in her mind, and that she felt was cruel. "Are you sorry you waited, aunt?" she said.
Her aunt was a long time before she answered. "His stipend forbade it," she said, and seemed to fall into a train of thought. "It would have been rash and unwise," she said at the end of a meditation. "What he had was altogether insufficient."
Ann Veronica looked at the mildly pensive gray eyes and the comfortable, rather refined face with a penetrating curiosity. Presently her aunt sighed deeply and looked at the clock. "Time for my Patience," she said. She got up, put the neat cuffs she had made into her work-basket, and went to the bureau for the little cards in the morocco case. Ann Veronica jumped up to get her the card-table. "I haven't seen the new Patience, dear," she said. "May I sit beside you?"
"It's a very difficult one," said her aunt. "Perhaps you will help me shuffle?"
