She nodded, a wistful look creeping into the hazel eyes, and they were both silent for a little. The automobile had turned on to a fashionable boulevard, and was skimming along like the wind. Presently a grey stone house loomed before them.
“Here we are!” cried Marquis—and, a minute later, Uncle Mac and Aunt Fanny were welcoming the Brookdale niece to their city home.
Aunt Fanny was tall and distinguished looking. Quis was like her; Jacquette saw that at a glance. Uncle Mac was stout and blue-eyed—and dear and kind.
After the first greetings he held his niece off at arm’s length, and looked deep into her eyes.
“Your mother’s own girl,” he said, with a mist in his voice. “Fanny, let’s keep her for ours after this.”
“At any rate, we shall be very glad to keep her for ours until Father Granville and Sula come, Malcolm,” Aunt Fanny answered in even tones, and Jacquette, glancing shyly up at the white profile of her statuesque, dark-haired aunt, felt, suddenly, that she knew who ruled her uncle’s home.
Mrs. Malcolm Granville was a woman who prided herself on her practical common sense, and, though she was very willing to receive Jacquette into her luxurious home for a visit, she had no intention of allowing her husband to put any foolish ideas, even for a minute, into the mind of his niece. As she reasoned, Jacquette, with the modest inheritance left to her by her father, was very suitably placed in the unpretentious home of her grandfather and unmarried aunt, and there was no good reason for saying or doing anything which might cause her to feel discontented with this arrangement.
As a matter of fact, there was not the slightest danger. Jacquette was too devotedly attached to her adopted mother to consider, for a moment, the thought of leaving her, and she felt an impulse to tell Aunt Fanny so on the spot, but she controlled it, and, after a few days, she learned, as people always did, to make allowances for Aunt Fanny’s “way,” and to appreciate her kindness, in spite of it.
“Now I’m going to carry this girl straight off to bed,” Aunt Fanny declared, presently, after Jacquette, relieved of her wraps and seated in a rocker before the fireplace in the library, had been served with a dainty tray of refreshments. “You see she can’t eat a mouthful, even though she confesses to not having taken dinner on the train. I believe she has swallowed three sips of milk and one nibble of that roll, altogether. She’s tired and excited, and the longer she stays here answering your questions, Malcolm, the more tired she’ll be.”
“Oh, mother, it’s disgracefully early!” Marquis protested, but Uncle Malcolm, leaning back in his big leather chair, smiled good-naturedly.