the story. Never mind what a
personality is but go on--and, Peter, you young ass, keep still."

"I only wanted to know," muttered Peter sulkily.

"I DO know what personality is, but it's hard to explain," said the
Story Girl, relenting. "It's what makes you different from Dan, Peter,
and me different from Felicity or Cecily. Miss Reade's Aunt Una had a
personality that was very uncommon. And she was beautiful, too, with
white skin and night-black eyes and hair--a 'moonlight beauty,' Miss
Reade called it. She used to keep a kind of a diary, and Miss Reade's
mother used to read parts of it to her. She wrote verses in it and they
were lovely; and she wrote descriptions of the old garden which she
loved very much. Miss Reade said that everything in the garden, plot
or shrub or tree, recalled to her mind some phrase or verse of her
Aunt Una's, so that the whole place seemed full of her, and her memory
haunted the walks like a faint, sweet perfume.

"Una had, as I've told you, a lover; and they were to have been married
on her twentieth birthday. Her wedding dress was to have been a gown of
white brocade with purple violets in it. But a little while before it
she took ill with fever and died; and she was buried on her birthday
instead of being married. It was just in the time of opening roses. Her
lover has been faithful to her ever since; he has never married, and
every June, on her birthday, he makes a pilgrimage to the old garden and
sits for a long time in silence on the bench where he used to woo her
on crimson eves and moonlight nights of long ago. Miss Reade says she
always loves to see him sitting there because it gives her such a deep
and lasting sense of the beauty and strength of love which can thus
outlive time and death. And sometimes, she says, it gives her a little
eerie feeling, too, as if her Aunt Una were really sitting there beside
him, keeping tryst, although she has been in her grave for forty years."

"It would be real romantic to die young and have your lover make a
pilgrimage to your garden every year," reflected Sara Ray.

"It would be more comfortable to go on living and get married to him,"
said Felicity. "Mother says all those sentimental ideas are bosh and I
expect they are. It's a wonder Beautiful Alice hasn't a beau herself.
She is so pretty and lady-like."

"The Carlisle fellows all say she is too stuck up," said Dan.

"There's nobody in Carlisle half good enough for her," cried the Stor