That night some one tapped at the bedroom door of Aunt Phyllis. “Come in,” she cried, slipping into her dressing-gown, and Joan entered. She was still wearing the dress of spangled black in which she had danced with Huntley and Wilmington and Peter. She went to her aunt’s fire in silence and stood over it, thinking.
“You’re having a merry Christmas, little Joan?” said Aunt Phyllis, coming and standing beside her.
“Ever so merry, Auntie. We go it—don’t we?”
Aunt Phyllis looked quickly at the flushed young face beside her, opened her mouth to speak and said nothing. There was a silence, it seemed a long silence, between them. Then Joan asked in a voice that she tried to make offhand, “Auntie. Who was my father?”
Aunt Phyllis was deliberately matter-of-fact. “He was the brother of Dolly—Peter’s mother.”
“Where is he?”
“He was killed by an omnibus near the Elephant and Castle when you were two years old.”
“And my mother?”
“Died three weeks after you were born.”
Joan was wise in sociological literature. “The usual fever, I suppose,” she said.