The door from the bedroom opened softly and Aunt Anna came in. Her cheeks were pink from the fresh air outside, her fair hair was ruffled, and she was wrapped in the dark fur robe that the girls had laid over her bed. She looked very pretty as she sat in the big chair that they pulled out for her, the glow of the fire lighting her face.
“I heard your voices,” she said, “and, though it is glorious out there with the sound of the water and with the tops of the trees showing against the stars, I was not able to sleep, so I thought I would come in and talk to you a little.” She leaned back in her chair and sighed blissfully. “What good care you take of me and how well I feel! I do not seem to be the same person.”
The girls laughed in unison, it was so like what they had been saying.
“Beatrice,” her aunt went on suddenly, “Dr. Minturn told me about your falling over the cliff when you went to fetch him for me.”
“It was not much of a cliff,” returned Beatrice sheepishly, involuntarily rubbing the bruised elbow that was now the one memento of her misadventure. She had meant to keep that incident from Aunt Anna’s knowledge.
“It frightened me,” her aunt said, “but it opened my eyes to what you were willing to do for me. We are all of us changed and we are all beginning to understand one another better. At home, with your rounds of shopping and motoring and dancing, I used to think we were not much more than casually acquainted. And there was something of which I always wanted to talk to you, but I wondered if a day would ever come when you would have time to listen and understand. I did not want you to hear unless you could see it all as clearly as I did myself.”
“And do you think,” asked Beatrice, her voice low and eager, “do you believe that the time has come now?”
“Yes,” was the answer, “I think the time has come now. It is right that you should hear at last what has been hanging heavy on my heart for these ten years—about why I came here—about my brother.”
“I have often wondered,” Aunt Anna began her story that was to explain so much that the girls had not understood; “I have often wondered that you did not remember your uncle, my younger brother Jack. When you talked of things you had done when you were small children, I used to listen hungrily, hoping you might speak of him, but you never did. He was with us a great deal when you were little things, and he was always in the nursery or playing with you in the garden, for he loved children. That was soon after I came to live with you, and when he was in college, studying to be an engineer. He spent all his vacations with us: I wish you had not been too young to remember.”