“Yes,” said Frances, simply. “We have, Auntie—”
“There! do you hear that, Hosy? Isn't it good to hear her call me 'Auntie' again! Now I'm satisfied; or”—with a momentary hesitation—“pretty nearly satisfied, anyway.”
“Oh, then you're not quite satisfied, after all,” I observed. “What more do you want?”
“I want just one thing more; just one, that's all.”
I believed I know what that one thing was, but I asked her. She shot a look at me, a look of indignant meaning.
“Never mind,” she said, decidedly. “That's my affair. Oh, Ho!” with a reminiscent chuckle, “how that Cripps woman did glare at me when I said 'twas pretty risky her callin' the Almighty's attention to their doin's. I hope it did her good. Maybe she'll think of it next time she goes to chapel. But I suppose she won't. All such folks care for is money. They wouldn't be so anxious to get to Heaven if they hadn't read about the golden streets.”
That evening, at the hotel, Frances told us her story, the story of which we had guessed a good deal, but of which she had told so little—how, after her father's death, she had gone to live with the Crippses because, as she thought, they wished her to do so from motives of generosity and kindness.
“They are not really relatives of mine,” she said. “I am glad of that. Mrs. Cripps married a cousin of my father's; he died and then she married Mr. Cripps. After Father's death they wrote me a very kind letter, or I thought it kind at the time. They said all sorts of kindly things, they offered me a home, they said I should be like their own daughter. So, having nowhere else to go, I went to them. I lived there nearly two years. Oh, what a life it was! They are very churchly people, they call themselves religious, but I don't. They pretend to be—perhaps they think they are—good, very good. But they aren't—they aren't. They are hard and cruel. Mr. Cripps owns several tenements where poor people live. I have heard things from those people that—Oh, I can't tell you! I ran away because I had learned what they really were.”
Hephzy nodded. “What I can't understand,” she said, “is why they offered you a home in the first place. It was because they thought you had money comin' to you, that's plain enough now; but how did they know?”
Frances colored. “I'm afraid—I'm afraid Father must have written them,” she said. “He needed money very much in his later years and he may have written them asking—asking for loans and offering my 'inheritance' as security. I think now that that was it. But I did not think so then. And—and, Oh, Auntie, you mustn't think too harshly of Father. He was very good to me, he really was. And DON'T you think he believed—he had made himself believe—that there was money of his there in America? I can't believe he—he would lie to me.”