Out in the corridor I met my aunt coming to my room.
“I have told your grandmother,” she whispered. “She is terribly excited. I ought to have waited, perhaps—to let her get acquainted with you and then to tell her after she became fond of you. Oh, I wish I had! But it is too late now. Anyway, we mustn’t keep her waiting a minute. How lovely you look, Azalea! Just as a young girl should. Will you come with me now? Your uncle is with his mother.”
I had never seen Aunt Lorena excited before, and I could hardly understand why she should be so now, though I will confess that I felt very strange myself. I had to take hold of Aunt Lorena’s arm going down that long flight of stairs.
Then, once we were down, the old black butler bowed us into the drawing-room, which was glittering with old-time luster candelabra, and at the end of the room, all in gray and white and diamonds, with hair of pure silver, was the littlest, proudest, stateliest lady I ever saw or dreamed of. You cannot imagine how small she was or how regal. She sat in a high-backed carved chair on a dais, like a queen, and Uncle David stood by her quite as if he were her prime minister and were terribly worried over some affair of state.
I saw him looking at me anxiously, and I knew he was doubting my power to please this little queenly lady. But at that very moment all of my own fears departed and I only remembered that at last here was one of my very, very own folk, and I ran down the room and lifted her hand in mine and kissed it. Yes, I knelt right there on that queer little dais and held her hand to my lips. I was going to call her “grandmother,” but she looked so regal that I could not quite speak that familiarly, so I called her “madam grandmother” instead.
“Madam grandmother,” I cried, “I am your own granddaughter. Please, please love me!”
“Arise, my child,” she said as if I were indeed the long lost daughter of a queen—as I so often had pretended to be—and she lifted me up and looked at me through her little gold-rimmed lorgnette.
“David,” she said proudly, “she is the living image of our dear Jack!”
“Yes, mother,” said Uncle David gently. “I was sure you would think that, and indeed I agree with you, and so does Lorena.”
“Lorena,” said madam grandmother in a voice of command, “I confide this child to your keeping. She must be your especial care. You will rear her, Lorena, to be worthy of her name.”