And it was of herself—of all people in the world!—she was thinking. She was looking back, recalling her past life, and marveling over it with a pleasant little wonder.
And yet there was nothing very marvelous in it after all.
Ever since she could remember she and Jeffrey—“dear old Jeffrey!”—had been alone. Ever since she could remember he had seemed to her as bent and white-haired and old as he was now, and she knew no more of him, or how it happened that he had stood to her in place of mother and father, and kith and kin, than she knew now.
Of her real father and her mother she had always been totally ignorant. As a child she had accepted Jeffrey as a fact, without questioning, and when, in later years, she had put some questions about her parents to him, she had equally accepted the answer.
“Ask me nothing, Doris. Your mother was an angel; your father——” Then he had stopped and left her; and, from that day to this, Doris had not repeated the question.
They had lived, she remembered, in complete solitude. Of Jeffrey’s early life she knew nothing for certain, excepting that he had been an actor; that he had been—and was—a gentleman; and that he had received a good education.
She had no other tutor than he, and she could have had no better. With a skill and patience which sprang from his love for her, he had taught her as few girls are taught. As a child, she would speak and write with wonderful fluency, and at the age most girls are struggling with five-finger exercises, she could play a sonata of Beethoven’s with a touch and brilliance which a professional might have envied.
Her strange guardian’s patience was untiring. He ransacked the stores of his memory on her behalf, he spent hours explaining the inner meaning of some line from Shakespeare—in showing her how to render a difficult piece of music.
And when, one day, when her beautiful girlhood was rich with the promise of a still more beautiful womanhood, she had looked up at him laughingly, and said:
“Why do you take all this trouble with me, Jeffrey? What shall I do with all these things you have taught me?” he had startled her by turning to her with flashing eyes, and saying, with grim earnestness: