Beryl, recognizing that her story needed detailed explanation, slipped off her outer wraps, threw them into a chair, kissed her father lightly on his cheek, perched herself on the old sofa and proceeded to tell the story of Gordon Forsyth's coming to Gray Manor while her mother listened with breathless interest.
"And it's a girl she is—a little lame girl!"
"The queerest kid you ever saw. Not a bit snippy or rich acting. She doesn't get at all excited over her new clothes and bossing those old fogeys around and ordering her motor any minute she wants it. She thinks the little place she lived in in New York is lots nicer than Gray Manor. When you look at her you think she's a baby and then when she talks, why—she seems older than I am! But she's funny like you, Mom; she's always pretending things are different from what they are and giving them names. She calls old Budge the wicked woman who wanted to eat the two children," Beryl giggled. "And she calls the Mills a Giant."
Moira Lynch's face beamed with joyous understanding. Here was a fellow-soul, "funny" like herself, Beryl described her; Beryl, for whom black was always and invariably black, and a spade a spade.
"Why, she even wanted to come down here with me," Beryl finished.
There were so many questions trembling on Moira's tongue that, for the moment, supper was neglected. Not long, however; the striking of the clock reminded her that in a very few minutes Dale would be home, hungry. Her mission in life, next to tending her big Danny, was feeding her two children. For tonight she had made Beryl's favorite dessert, a bread pudding, the eggs for which she had carefully hoarded during several days' denial. Beryl, keeping up a running fire of talk, spread the cloth on the centre table and brought the dishes from the cupboard.
"By'n by, you'll be too fine for the rest of us," broke in big Danny upon their chatter, the usual discordant tone in his voice.
"Well, I guess it won't be your fault if I am," Beryl flared. "Everything that I've gotten I've gotten for myself and I don't know of anyone ever trying to help me."
Like a flash the little mother was between the two, a soothing hand on the father's shoulder.
"Now don't you two be a-spoiling this night," she laughed a bit hysterically. "Of course our girl's going to be too fine for anyone, but it's always a-loving she'll be to her Dad and her Mommy." She declared it with an ardent triumph. This mother who had once dreamed things for herself dreamed them now for her boy and girl. From Beryl's infancy she had taught her to want "fine things." And Beryl wanted them with all her heart and, with youth's selfishness, wanted them for herself, alone.