"After all, better be sure," she thought. "It is a very curious old trinket, Estelle," she said, returning the chain. "Some time when you think of it, I wish you would look in your father's papers and find the married name of that cousin who went to New York State."
CHAPTER XX
WIN WONDERS
"Mother," said Win solemnly, "I shook in my shoes this afternoon. Didn't you notice the lurid mixture of colors I was daubing on my block? And all because I knew you were having psychic thoughts and I was so afraid you would say what I thought you were thinking and startle Estelle. I wanted so much to know myself just what you were driving at with your watch-chains that I almost chewed my tongue off trying not to speak."
"I know it," said Mrs. Thayne. "I felt you quaking, Win, and decided to keep still. After all, the only sensible way was to find out definitely that name. Estelle is so proud and so reluctant to accept help that one must move carefully in trying to smooth her pathway."
The two were alone in Mrs. Thayne's room after the happy picnic at Corbiére. Through the open window floated the occasional sound of voices from the end of the terrace where Roger, Edith, and Frances stood watching the steamer for Southampton round Noirmont Point.
"And now that I do know the name, I am still uncertain what is best to do," reflected Mrs. Thayne. "But you asked about the chain, Win. The moment I saw that one of Estelle's I knew that I had seen a similar one in the United States. For a time I could not place it, and really it is a thing of unusual workmanship and not likely to be largely duplicated. Then it came to me in a flash that Carrie Aldrich often wears a chain like that and once told me that it had belonged to her mother."
"But I never knew that Mrs. Aldrich was English," said Win wonderingly.
"I thought she'd always lived in Boston."
"I knew that she was a Canadian," replied his mother, "but she was educated in the United States and married an American. To trace her ancestry never occurred to me. She is so thoroughly and completely American that one would never think of her forefathers as being anything else.
"I can hardly keep silent," she went on. "When I think of Carrie alone in that huge house in Boston, with her big income and her still bigger heart and only her charities to fill it and to occupy her time, and then think of Estelle, so proudly trying to support herself and Edith in a land where self-support for women is not easy,—why, Win, it seems as though I must tell her on the spot. And yet, if I do, I am quite sure Estelle will just shut herself up in the armor of her pride and refuse to make herself known. Taking both the testimony of the chains and the very pronounced family resemblance, there can be no reasonable doubt of the identity."