“I saw Mrs. Hayes’s death in the paper. I made inquiries from Grindlay and Co. her agents. There was a Miss Hayes, they believed—a step-daughter—and I came by the first train. I am going to take you back with me to-day”—looking at his watch—“by the four o’clock train. We shall not be home before ten o’clock to-night. I see you are half packed.”
“Yes, I was going to-morrow.”
“Then I am just in the nick of time! I never knew of your existence, my dear, until this morning. I wish I had. There is no use in raking up old miseries now. My father and mother were stern and unforgiving—especially my father; and your mother had been everything to them—they were so proud of her. Well, she was headstrong. My Dolly is the same. Your father was a singularly handsome and fascinating fellow. She walked out and married him one morning in St. James’s Piccadilly; and my father, when he heard the news, drew the blinds down all over the house, and gave out that Gwen was dead. And then poor Gwen died within a year in real earnest. We heard that the baby died too; but I—I wished to make sure, and I wrote out to your father and made inquiries, and offered to receive the child, if it had survived, and he simply returned me my own letter. If I had known, it would have been different for you of late years. Your father was too proud. Pride cost a good deal, you see. It cost my father his daughter—well, well!”
“How is Miss Chalgrove? I heard she had met with an accident.”
“It’s not much—a mere strain, she says. Only for that, she would have accompanied me; but she has to lie still—a hard thing for her; and she is not Miss Chalgrove, but your cousin Dolly. She declares that she recognized you at a dance by your likeness to the family. I saw you too, and was struck by the same thing, but I thought it was accidental. Dolly tried to find out your name, and to get formally introduced to you, but she was told that you were a niece of some Miss Bennys, and that they had taken you away early in the evening. Then we returned home, and, almost immediately, she met with this horrible fall, and that put things out of her head until the other day, when some one wrote a letter and spoke of a pretty Miss Hayes, living here, having lost her stepmother. Then we saw the Times notice, and put two and two together, and here I am! Even if your likeness to Gwen did not speak for you, I see her things about. That Prayer-book, there, I gave her myself. How was it that you never sent me a line?”
“I never heard anything about my mother’s people until after that ball, when I told my stepmother of Miss Chalgrove’s resemblance to myself. And then she told me all about my mother, and how my father would never hear the name of Chalgrove mentioned. He never dreamt that he would be leaving me alone in the world; and he was implacable on that one subject.”
We talked for more than half an hour, my uncle and I. I felt as if I had known him for a long time. I told him all my circumstances; in short, told him everything—excepting about Mr. Somers.
“You know the Somers, perhaps?” he asked.