"I hope you will be happy, very happy," she said in an awed voice.

Harriet rose, to follow her sister's example but she looked viciously at her mother.
"He is a good ten years older than Annie," she said.
"And a good twenty-five younger than you," said the old lady, and sipped her coffee delicately.

"He is just the right age for Annie." Harriet kissed Annie, but her lips were cold and Annie wondered.

It never occurred to her then, nor later, to imagine that her Aunt Harriet might have had her own dreams which had never entirely ended in rainbow mists.

She did not know how hardly dreams die.