`` 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 has n't a beau herself . She is so pretty and lady-like . ''
`` The Carlisle fellows all say she is too stuck up , '' said XXXXX .
Alice Cecily Dan Mother Reade every nights tryst twentieth years