“Rochester! You don’t tell me! We went to Rochester for shopping and the theatre, as people in Springdale go to St. Louis. What a little world it is, after all. Did you ever hear of a town called Bromfield?”
Judith searched her memory. At last she had it. She had driven to that village more than once with her grandfather, Dr. Holden. She recalled one visit, when the sleigh was insecurely anchored in front of a house on Main Street, while she curled up for a nap in the great fur robes on the seat. The horse, arriving at the mental state which demanded dinner, before the physician was ready to leave the house, had untied the hitching strap and cantered unconcernedly to the livery stable where he was in the habit of being fed.
“You don’t mean that you were the little girl in the sleigh!” Mrs. Trench’s eyes were scintillating with astonished interest. “I’ll show you the account of it—in the Bromfield Sentinel. I have a complete file of the little home paper. And it will surprise you to know that the man your grandfather was calling on was Robert Larimore, my father. He died of brain hemorrhage, that same night. All the Larimores go that way—suddenly. Dr. Holden was called, when my father’s mother died, but it was all over before the telegram reached him. And your grandmother ... she must have been the Mrs. Holden who did so much work among the poor.”
“Yes, my parents left Rochester to escape from her pets. That, of course, is only a family joke. My father spent a good many years in South America, and I was left with my grandparents. One of my brothers was born in Bolivia and the other in the Argentine. I didn’t see them until they were six and ten years old.”
Mrs. Trench was not listening. Should she ... or should she not? In the end, she did. “Mrs. Ascott, I know it sounds like a foolish question—a city the size of Rochester—but you said a moment ago that as a child you knew everybody. Did you ever hear of a family named Fournier?”
“The people who kept the delicatessen, around the corner from my grandfather’s private sanitarium? Yes, I knew them well.”
“Was there a daughter—Lettie or Arletta—some such name? She’d be a woman of about forty-five by this time, I should think.”
“No, she was the niece, a wild, highstrung girl who gave them a good deal of trouble. She ran away and was married, at sixteen—some worthless fellow from up-state, who afterward tried to get out of it.”
“Worthless?” Mrs. Trench bristled unaccountably.
“That was the way Lettie’s people regarded him. Their little boy and I played together, as children. My grandmother took a lively interest in Lettie, as she did in all wayward girls who found no sympathy at home. I remember she devoted a good deal of her time to the patching up of quarrels between Lettie and her husband—and keeping peace in the family, when he was in Rochester with them.”