“Yes, of course. Mother, I don’t know what you will say,” pursued Joan, raising sad, soft eyes to Dulcibel’s face, but seeing nothing beyond. The flush in her cheeks faded, and Dulcibel, who had already risen, drew nearer anxiously. “I went yesterday—no, not yesterday, but a day or two before—to see old Mr. Brooke. And he—Oh, I don’t know how to tell you,” Joan said bitterly.
Dulcibel was becoming alarmed.
“Is anything really the matter, Joan?” she asked. “I wish you would say quickly what it is. You flutter me so. Mr. Brooke! Isn’t he that unpleasant old man who called himself your grandfather?”
“Yes, and he says the same still,” said Joan sorrowfully. “He does not want to have anything to do with me, and I don’t suppose I shall ever see him again. It is not that, but something worse—much worse. Mother, he says—”
“Joan, please make haste, and don’t startle mother,” said Nessie, foreseeing hysterics. “Leo, make her speak out.”
Joan turned with a slight start towards Leo, and he came forward.
“Leo!” she uttered.
“Yes; I came home by an earlier train. Perhaps you would rather not have me for a listener,” he said, taking Joan’s cold hand into his own. “Shall I go away, or may I hear what you have to tell?”
“Oh, I suppose you may as well stay. It doesn’t matter,” said Joan hoarsely, drawing her fingers from his grasp. “You will have to know. It will not be a secret. If I don’t say it, father must, and that is so bad for him! It is only—I know who my grandfathers are now. Mr. Brooke is one, and the other is old Mr. Cairns the farmer. And his daughter Marian is my mother—the one who nursed mother so nicely last autumn. I don’t think I believe it all, but he says it is true.”
Joan spoke in quick, broken sentences as if breath were failing her.