Should she hesitate at a lie if it would cover the maiden reserve that she had cherished so long?
However, Charlotte had suspected more than her aunt knew of the true cause of her agitation.

A similar motive for grief made her acute.
Sylvia, mourning alone of a Sabbath night upon her hair-cloth sofa, struck an old chord of her own heart.

Charlotte dared not say a word to comfort her directly.

She condoled with her for the fifteen-years-old loss of her mother, and did not allude to Richard Alger; but going home she said to herself, with a miserable qualm of pity, that poor Aunt Sylvia was breaking her heart because Richard had stopped coming.
"It's harder for Aunt Sylvia because she's older," thought Charlotte, on her way home that night.

But then she thought also, with a sorer qualm of self-pity, that Sylvia had not quite so long a life before her, to live alone.