He appeared to yield reluctantly to her insistence. "If you're so bent on knowing—and, mind you, I tell you only because you make me—she ain't so very far from where we are standing. I could take you to her in ten minutes."
She looked at him as if she scarcely believed his words. "You mean that she is in town?"
"Haven't you known me long enough to find out that I always mean what I say?"
"Then you can take me to her now?"
He laughed shortly, and dug the end of his walking stick between the pavement and the edge of the curbstone. "What do you reckon the Governor would say to it?"
"I needn't tell him—not just yet, anyhow. But are you really and truly sure that she is my mother's sister?"
"Well, they had the same parents, and I reckon that makes 'em sisters if anything does. I knew 'em both out yonder in California, and I never heard anybody suggest they weren't related."
"Why did she come here? Was it to see me?"
"Partly that, and partly—well, she's been pretty sick. I reckon she's likely to go off at any time, and she wanted to be back where she was born. She had pneumonia two years ago, and then again last winter. Her lungs are about used up."
"Then, if I went to see her, I'd better go now, hadn't I?"