After ages and æons, to Kate’s tense mind, Aunt Katherine folded the letter, check and all. Then their eyes met. The one thing that the expression in her aunt’s eyes told Kate was that she was surprised, though glad, to find her still there. She stretched both her hands to her.
“Kate, Kate,” she said with a rising inflection of happiness in her voice. “I’ve been all wrong, wrong about Elsie’s father, but even more wrong about Elsie! She has proved that by running away with her father. The blessed darling! The poor lamb!”
Kate felt that she was on a merry-go-round of surprises. “You are glad she has run away?”
“How can I be anything but rejoiced!”
Kate turned a little cold at that. “And you won’t try to stop them?” she asked.
“No, no need. Nick says he will give me their address as soon as they have one. Then I shall go to them, wherever it is. I will bring them back. Kate, she must adore her father! And all the while, just because she kept the agreement not to speak of him, I thought her indifferent to his sufferings, and unnatural. Why, from this, she must have suffered more than he.” Miss Frazier tapped the folded letter with her lorgnette. “He says that when he looked in at your party and saw Elsie so beautifully gowned, and having such a good time, his heart failed him; he decided that he must not take her away from all this. But Elsie herself made him see that she would never be happy anywhere but with him no matter how poor they were. It was Elsie who insisted on this harebrained scheme of running away! Elsie, who I thought hadn’t a grain of spirit or affection! Why, I’m just turned topsy-turvy by it all! Bless that poor child! And Nick wrote ‘The King of the Fairies.’ I ought to have guessed that instantly. Bless him, I say, too, the poor, abused, misguided poet. Do you remember St. Francis? You know he, too——”
But Miss Frazier broke off in her song of praise.
“You poor child, you,” she cried, meaning Kate. “This must all be a mystery. We’ll wait till your mother is here. Then we can talk it all over.” She hugged Kate as she spoke, much as though she herself were a young girl in the most exuberant of spirits.
“I shall wear my black lace,” she said, pushing Kate laughingly away from her. “We must be gorgeous for your mother. Hurry into your pink organdie. Why, she may be at the door this minute.”
Thus freed, Kate flew to Elsie. Elsie was waiting, almost ill with anxiety. “Did you manage it?” she asked.