“I think that is a very nice name for him. Here he comes now with Jack. We have had a very nice talk, haven’t we? Yet there are many things left over for another time. Shall I tell Bob he has an adopted sister?”
“Not now; some time when just we three are together.”
Mrs. Marriott smiled and nodded, thinking to herself: “Dear child, how seriously she takes it.”
Then Bob and Jack came up, and presently Mrs. Barry joined them, and the talk turned to those days when Mrs. Barry and Joanne’s mother were girls together. Much as she loved her grandparents Joanne felt that her life was greatly enriched by these new friends, especially when Mrs. Barry whispered, as they were going out to lunch, “Please call me Aunt Ellie. I don’t like to think that the daughter of my dear Anne Murray means to treat me with formality.”
“I’d love to call you that,” Joanne whispered back. Therefore when she left Chevy Chase that afternoon she felt herself much richer than when she arrived there, for had she not an adopted mother, brother and aunt?
“You must come out very often,” said Mrs. Barry as she kissed her good-bye.
“I shall love to,” returned Joanne enthusiastically, “and between times please think up a lot of things to tell me about my mother. You know, Aunt Ellie, I have so few relatives, for my father was an only child, as I am, and my mother’s brothers and sisters all live in the far west.”
“Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to talk about dear Anne,” Mrs. Barry assured her.
She went off feeling that Dame Fortune had been very kind to her. As the car sped along between gardens where pink dogwood and white, lilac and apple blooms gladdened the eye, where yellow and red tulips blazed forth, Joanne inwardly gave thanks for friends and flowers. “It is a beautiful world,” she said as she went into the library.
Her grandmother looked up and smiled a little absently, but her grandfather held out his hand. “Come here and tell me about it,” he said.