“Of course you do!” he comforted, “but—be brave, Lyn!” He feared to excite Ann. Then the weary eyes of the child turned to him.
“Mommy-Lyn does love me!” the weak voice was barely audible; “she does, father, she does!”
It was like a confirmation—a recognition of something beautiful and sacred.
“I felt,” Lynda said afterward to Betty, “as if she were not only telling Con, but God, too. I had not deserved it—but it made up for all the hard struggle, and swept everything before it.”
But Ann did not die. Slowly, almost hesitatingly, she turned back to them and brought a new power with her. She, apparently, left her baby looks and nature in the shadowy place from which she had escaped. Once health came to her, she was the merriest of merry children—almost noisy at times—in the rollicking fashion of Betty’s irrepressible Bobilink. And the haunting likeness to Truedale was gone. For a year or two the lean, thready little girl looked like no one but her own elfish self; and then—it was like a revealment—she grew to be like Nella-Rose!
Lynda, at times, was breathless as she looked and remembered. She had seen the mother only once; but that hour had burned the image of face, form, and action into her soul. She recalled, too, Conning’s graphic description of his first meeting with Nella-Rose. The quaint, dramatic power that had marked Ann’s mother, now developed in the little daughter. She had almost entirely lost the lingering manner of speech—the Southern expressions and words—but she was as different from the children with whom she mingled as she had ever been.
When she was strong enough she resumed her studies with the governess and also began music. This she enjoyed with the passion that marked her attitude toward any person or thing she loved.
“Oh, it lets something in me, free!” she confided to Truedale. “I shall never be naughty or unkind again—I wouldn’t dare!”
“Why?” Conning was no devotee of music and was puzzled by Ann’s intensity.
“Why,” she replied, puckering her brows in the effort to make herself clear, “I—I wouldn’t be worthy of—of the beautiful music, if I were horrid.”