“Oh, Miss Fifield,” and Rose caught her hand, “we all forget things; I know I tried you lots of times by forgetting. It wasn’t—I suppose—strange they should have thought as they did, but it’s all right now. And please promise me, Mr. Fifield and Miss Eudora, that you will let it all go, and never say anything unpleasant to Miss Fifield about it.”
“Why, child!” cried Mr. Nathan, as if astonished at the idea, “I wouldn’t say anything unpleasant to my sisters, I never do. Of course I have to hold them level now and then, but I don’t know as I ever spoke a really unpleasant word to them in my life.”
“Yes,” Miss Fifield’s tone was complacent, “that is one of the things I have always been thankful for, that we were a perfectly harmonious family. I don’t deny that I am tried sometimes with Nathan and Eudora, but I never let them know it.”
“I have my trials, too,” added Miss Eudora with a pensive shake of her little grey curls, “but I bear them in silence. Family squabbles are so disgraceful that I don’t see how a person of refinement could ever take part in one.”
Rose stared round-eyed from one to another speaker, and Silence Blossom turned her face away for a moment; but Grandmother Sweet smiled gently, for she had long ago learned how seldom it is that people know their own faults, or see themselves as others see them.
As they were leaving Miss Fifield turned to Rose. “Of course we shall want you to come back to us. When will that be?”
“Not just at present,” Mrs. Blossom hastened to answer. “First of all she must have time to rest and get back to her usual self.” Rose lifted grateful eyes, for at that moment it didn’t seem to her that she could enter the Fifield house again.
At the door Miss Eudora paused. “And you haven’t heard anything yet about her people? Finding the marriage certificate in the locket was just like a story. And if she should prove to be an heiress how romantic that would be! I heard of such a case the winter I was in Albany.”
CHAPTER XVIII
GREAT-UNCLE SAMUEL
Surprising events were not over for Rose. The next morning as she was dusting the sitting-room, with a lighter heart than she had thought could ever again be hers, a carriage drew up at the small white gate, from which an old gentleman alighted and came nimbly along the narrow, flagged walk, tapping the stones smartly with his gold-headed cane.