Sarah Judd vanished from the hall.
As if she were weak, Mrs. Danforth steadied herself by the back of the chair, and then turned for another look at the blue-eyed boy before the fire.
With a very genuine desire to be a little gentleman,—as his mother always told him to be,—Ben did the very best thing in the world which he could have done. Stepping forward, though still with his hand upon his sister’s shoulder, he looked up into Mrs. Danforth’s face and said most respectfully: “I think you are a very nice grandmother. I wish Alice and I had a grandmother.”
“Then you have no grandmother?” she asked slowly, with that strange tremble in her voice again, and clasping her hands tight together behind the long sable boa.
“We had one, my father’s mother,” Ben answered soberly, still with his eyes fixed upon her face, “but that grandmother has gone away to heaven. We don’t know about our other grandmother. Mother says she will tell us about her sometime.”
Mrs. Danforth made a motion almost as if she would take the little fellow into her arms. Then she turned abruptly, not trusting herself to stay another moment.
Suddenly, as she turned, it no longer seemed hard for her to begin to carry out the purpose which had brought her to Berkeley, for Ben had walked straight into her heart, and she knew that she could no longer shut love out from her life.
Elsa followed her grandmother out of the room without a word except to say good-bye to the Club.
Ruth Warren found the children in silence when she came back from seeing her guest to the door. She felt that they were wondering, just as she was, whether Mrs. Danforth intended to take Elsa away from the Club, and whether it was because the twins’ mother worked sometimes in the market-garden.
It was just the right opportunity for Ruth Warren to put to the children a question which she had in her mind. She began by telling them about Elsa’s loss of her doll, but without speaking of Elsa’s night visit.