She drew a long breath and pressed her hand a little heavier on her breast, as she said, with the ghost of a smile, more pathetic than the saddest tears:
“I guess it, David.”
“How?” he demanded, as if defrauded of a joy he had set his heart upon.
“I met Kitty,—she told me nothing,—but her face betrayed what I have long suspected.”
David laughed, such a glad yet scornful laugh, and, snatching a little miniature from his pocket, offered it, saying, with the new impetuosity that changed him so:
“That is the daughter I have found for my mother. You know her,—you love her; and you will not be ashamed to welcome her, I think.”
Christie took it; saw a faded, time-worn likeness of a young girl’s happy face; a face strangely familiar, yet, for a moment, she groped to find the name belonging to it. Then memory helped her; and she said, half incredulously, half joyfully:
“Is it my Rachel?”
“It is my Letty!” cried David, with an accent of such mingled love and sorrow, remorse and joy, that Christie seemed to hear in it the death-knell of her faith in him. The picture fell from the hands she put up, as if to ward off some heavy blow, and her voice was sharp with reproachful anguish, as she cried:
“O David, David, any thing but that!”