Then Elliott gave up. If a mystery existed, either Laura didn’t know of it, or she had forgotten it, or else she considered it too negligible to mention.
The girl found that for some reason she did not care to ask Stannard the source of his information. Would Bruce himself prove communicative? There could be no harm in finding out. Besides, it would tease Stannard to see her talking with “that fellow,” and Elliott rather enjoyed teasing Stannard. And didn’t she owe him something for a dictatorial interruption?
The thing would require manœuvering. You couldn’t talk to Bruce Fearing, or to any one else up here, whenever you felt like it; he was far too busy. But on the hill at sunset Elliott found her chance.
“I think Aunt Jessica,” she remarked, 69 “is the most wonderful woman I’ve ever seen.”
A glow lit up Bruce’s quiet gray eyes. “Mother Jess,” he said, “is a miracle.”
“She is so terrifically busy, and yet she never seems to hurry; and she always has time to talk to you and she never acts tired.”
“She is, though.”
“I suppose she must be, sometimes. I like that name for her, ‘Mother Jess.’ Your—aunt, is she?”
“Oh, no,” said Bruce, simply. “I’ve no Cameron or Fordyce blood in me, or any other pedigreed variety. My corpuscles are unregistered. She and Father Bob took Pete and me in when I was a baby and Pete was a mere toddler. I was born in the hotel down in the town there,—Am I boring you?”
“No, indeed!” Elliott had the grace to blush at the ease with which she was carrying on her investigation.