“He doesn’t look like dad or Aunt Anna,” Beatrice protested suddenly, with no apparent connection with anything that had been said. “No, he isn’t like them at all.”
“Maybe not,” returned Nancy inscrutably, “but he has that same light yellow hair that she has. If Aunt Anna were very sunburnt or he were very pale—it might be—that they would not be so very different.”
Although the girls had talked so late of Aunt Anna’s story and the strange thought they had concerning it, they were up early next morning and still discussing the matter busily as they prepared breakfast.
“The question is,” said Nancy, plying her egg-beater with vigor, “shall we tell Aunt Anna what we think?”
“If we should be mistaken, and John Herrick should turn out to be, oh, just anybody, she would be so disappointed. Perhaps we had better wait.”
They had hardly finished breakfast when there was a knock at the door, followed by Dr. Minturn’s tall presence on the threshold. He inspected his patient and announced a very great improvement, and then said he must go on at once, since he hoped to visit the town and start back over the mountain that same day. Beatrice walked down with him through the pines, for he had tied his horse at the gate.
“Your aunt seems less worried and far more cheerful than before,” he said.
“Yes,” assented Beatrice, “I think it is because she has told us at last why she came.” She went on to give the substance of Aunt Anna’s story.
“I surmised it was something like that,” he observed when he had heard her to the end, “and I have been thinking about it ever since. I don’t know any man in this neighborhood by the name of Deems but—I believe he is not so far away after all.”
Dr. Minturn stopped, for they had reached the bars, but he made no move to mount his horse.
“I’m going to give you some advice that isn’t medical,” he began. “I think more of John Herrick than of any other man in the world, barring my own son, perhaps, and I love Hester as though she were mine. And you three here, your aunt and your sister and you, I have come to think of you all as better friends than I had ever thought to make again. Your aunt—why, she has more pluck in one inch of that little sick body of hers than I have in my whole big self, and her girls aren’t far behind her. I’d like to see her have what she wants, I’d like to see you all happy.”