Elizabeth leaped up softly, she held her hairbrush as though it were a scepter; her long hair flowed and billowed about her as she walked with majestic tread, up and down the tiny room--she was seeing visions!
If her name was not Spooner! That would mean that her birth was, she felt sure, indefinitely illustrious some way. Of course she would never desert the people who loved her, and whom she would always love, but--might not something come of it that would be grand for them all?
"Libby," Cousin Hannah's eyes followed the moving figure with a distressed look in them, "your ma--Jennie Spooner--your true ma, if love and tenderness count for anything, never wanted you told. Mary knows, and she don't want you should know. When I watch your uppity ways I tell 'em it's high time they explained the situation to you."
"The situation--" Elizabeth hung breathlessly on her words with shining eyes, and an eager tremble of her lips.
"Yes, the situation," repeated Cousin Hannah heavily. "Jennie Spooner had a tough time raisin' you--a troublesome young'un as ever I see. You teethed so hard that it looked like she never knew what a night's rest was till you got 'em through the gums. I used to come over here many a time and help her; what with Ruth bein' so nigh the same age, she had her hands full. It was kept from you for fear of hurtin' your feelin's, if you must know."
"How could it hurt my feelings?" questioned Elizabeth, a little puzzled. "I love them all--but they should have told me. They ought to have known they couldn't change--" a swan to a duckling had been on the tip of her tongue, but she stopped in time, "me to a Spooner, even by their love and kindness."
"Change you to a Spooner?" slow wrath mounted to Cousin Hannah's face. She caught Elizabeth's arm as the girl passed by. "I reckon they couldn't make a Spooner out o' you, that's a fact. The Spooners, bein', so far's known to me, respectable householders--"
"But not what my people were," suggested Elizabeth, her whole face alight, her eyes shining with eagerness. "You must tell me who they were--what my rightful name is."
Cousin Hannah groaned. "Looks like I've let the cat out of the bag--don't it? Well, what I've got to tell ain't nigh what you think I've got to tell," she asserted doggedly. "You'll be sorry for askin'."
Through Elizabeth's mind flashed visions of a wonderful ancestry; to do her justice these dream parents did not in any way displace the father and mother she really loved with all her young heart--they were only that vision which comes to us all in some shape when we feel we are misunderstood--different.