“Why was I named Anna?” she asked.
“It was your mother’s wish,” replied Mr Forrest. “I believe it was her mother’s name.”
“Is my grandmother alive?” said Anna.
“No; she died years before I ever saw your mother. Your grandfather, old Mr Goodwin, is living still—at Dornton.”
“At Dornton!” exclaimed Anna in extreme surprise. “Then why don’t I go to stay with him while you’re away, instead of at Waverley?”
“Because,” said Mr Forrest, turning from the window to face his daughter, “it has been otherwise arranged.”
Anna knew that tone of her father’s well; it meant that she had asked an undesirable question. She was silent, but her eager face showed that she longed to hear more.
“Your grandfather and I have not been very good friends,” said Mr Forrest at length, “and have not met for a good many years—but you’re too young to understand all that. He lives in a very quiet sort of way. Once, if he had chosen, he might have risen to a different position. But he didn’t choose, and he remains what he has been for the last twenty years—organist of Dornton church. He has great musical talent, I’ve always been told, but I’m no judge of that.”
These new things were quite confusing to Anna; it was difficult to realise them all at once. The beautiful, fair-haired mother, whose picture she held in her hand, was not so strange. But her grandfather! She had never even heard of his existence, and now she would very soon see him and talk to him. Her thoughts, hitherto occupied with Waverley and the Rectory, began to busy themselves with the town of Dornton, the church where her mother had been married, and the house where she had lived.
“Aunt Sarah knows my grandfather, of course,” she said aloud. “He will come to Waverley, and I shall go sometimes to see him at Dornton?”