“You have been dood, oh, so very, very dood!” she said, “but this is mamma.”
“I trusted my darling to you in a very strange way,” the lady began, “but not, believe me, without knowing in whose hands I placed her. I was in mortal terror, then, lest she should be taken from me, and I dared not keep her until she had been legally made mine, and mine only. But you have made me your debtor for life, and I shall try to show it some day.”
“But, at least, you will come in and wait until my father returns. He loves Rosebud so dearly, that it would be a cruelty to take her away until he has had time to bid her good-by.”
“You are right,” the stranger answered courteously. “Jane, go with the carriage to the hotel, and I will come or send for you when I want you.”
In a few moments more the strange lady was seated in the doctor’s parlor. Miss Harding saw now where Rosebud had got her bright, wilful beauty.
“I must explain,” the mother said, as she lifted her child upon her lap. “I am Mrs. Matthewson. My husband is dead, and Rosebud has a very, very large fortune of her own. Her uncles, who were to have the management of her property, by her father’s will, claimed her also; and I have had such a fight for her! They were unscrupulous men, and I feared to keep Rosebud with me, lest by some means they should get some hold on her. So I resolved to lend her to you for the summer; and, indeed, I never can reward you for all your care of her.”
“You can reward us only by not altogether taking her away from us. We have learned to love her very dearly.”
And, after a while, the doctor came home and heard all the story. And it was a week before Mrs. Matthewson had the heart to take away the child she had lent them. Then it was not long before the doctor and Miss Ellen had to go to see Rosebud. And then, very soon, Mrs. Matthewson had to bring her back again; and, really, so much going back and forth was very troublesome; and they found it more convenient, after a while, to join their households.
Before Rosebud came, the doctor had thought himself an old man, though he was only forty-five; but, as he said, Rosebud had made him young again; and Rosebud’s mamma found it possible to love him very dearly. But Miss Ellen always said it was Rosebud and nobody else whom her father married, and that he had been in love with the borrowed blossom from the first.