“D—did you find it out, Aunt Jane?” Dories asked, almost anxiously.
“Yes and no,” was the enigmatical answer. Then, tantalizingly, she remarked as she leaned back in her comfortable willow chair, having finished her share of the pudding, “This is wonderful weather, isn’t it, girls? If it keeps up I won’t want to go back next Monday. Perhaps we’ll stay a week longer as I had planned when we first came.” Then before the girls could reply, the grey eyes that could be so sharply penetrating turned to scrutinize Dories. “You look much better than you did when we came. You had a sort of fretful look as though you had a grudge against life. Now you actually look eager and interested.” Then, after a glance at Nann, “You are both getting brown as Indians.”
Would Miss Moore never come to the subject that was uppermost in the thoughts of the two girls? If she had written the message telling them that today they were to know all, why didn’t she begin the story, if it was to be a story?
How Dories hoped that she was to hear what had become of the fortune she had always believed should have been her father’s. Her own mother had never told her anything about it, but she had heard them talking before her father died; she had not understood them, but as she grew older she seemed vaguely to remember that there should have been money from somewhere, enough to have kept poverty from their door and more, probably, since her father’s Aunt Jane had so much.
But Miss Moore rose without having satisfied their burning curiosity. “Now, girls,” she said, “I’ll go in and read my letters while you wash the dishes. Later, when the fog drifts in, build a fire on the hearth and I’ll tell you a story.” Then she left them, going to her own room and closing the door.
“I’m so excited that I can hardly carry the dishes without dropping them,” Dories confided to Nann when at last they had returned the table to its place in the kitchen and were busily washing and drying the dishes. “What do you suppose the story is to be about?”
“You and your mother and father chiefly, I believe,” Nann said with conviction.
“Aunt Jane’s saying that she had a story to tell us proves, doesn’t it, that she wrote the messages?”
“I think so, Dori.”
“I hope the fog will come in early,” the younger girl remarked as she hung up the dish-wiper on the line back of the stove.