“Twelve o’clock, and all is well, Hugh. This is the first time I have been hugged in fifty years.”
Gently she pushed him from her with hands that still clung to him. He dropped his arms and stood looking down at her. She was touched to see the moisture in the eyes that met hers.
“It is good of you to let me hug you,” he replied in a low, thick voice.
“I suppose you think you have a lot of explanations to make,” she said, her kind tone wavering a little in the intense feeling of the moment, “but you haven’t. It was all so obvious after I gained the first clue, that it scarcely needed your Aunt Sukey’s X-ray mind to see the whole thing clear as A B C.”
“Don’t use that name!” exclaimed Hugh, as if it hurt.
“What? Aunt Sukey? Oh, I’ve X-rayed that, too. I can fully understand the idea of your great-aunt that you grew up with. I”—a catch in Miss Frink’s throat stopped her speech for a second—“I was very unkind to Philip—to your father. Mr. Ogden knew me, knew that the only way you could reach my heart was to smuggle you in; but you got there, Hugh, my own dear boy, you got there.”
Hugh caught her slender, dry hand in his big one.
“If I was Aunt Sukey to your father, I am Aunt Susanna to you, and it was a gift of God that it was you, yourself, who saved my life that I might not die before I knew what it is not to be all alone in the world: what it is to have my own flesh and blood to love, and perhaps to love me a little.”
“Aunt Susanna, I don’t feel worthy of your love,” exclaimed the boy hotly, but softly as if the dark wainscoted walls might have ears. “I hated it all the time.”
“I know that, too,” returned Miss Frink quietly.