“And now, my dear, tell me what has gone wrong with you,” said Miss Fausset, seating herself on the capacious sofa—low, broad, luxurious, one of Crunden’s masterpieces—beside her niece.
The rooms were growing shadowy. A small fire burned in the bright steel grate, and made the one cheerful spot in the room, touching the rich bindings of the books with gleams of light.
“O, it is a long story, aunt! I must begin at the beginning. I have a question to ask you, and your answer means life or death to me.”
“A question—to—ask—me?”
Miss Fausset uttered the words slowly, spacing them out, one by one, in her clear, calm voice—the voice that had spoken at committee meetings, and had laid down the law in matters charitable and ecclesiastical many times in that good town of Brighton.
“I must go back to my childhood, aunt, in the first place,” began Mildred, in her low, earnest voice, her hands clasped, her eyes fixed upon her aunt’s coldly correct profile, between her and the light of the fire, the wide window behind her, with the day gradually darkening after the autumnal sunset. The three eastward-looking windows in the large room beyond had a ghostly look, with their long guipure curtains closely drawn against the dying light.
“I must go back to the time when I was seven years old, and my dear father,” falteringly, and with tears in her voice, “brought home his adopted daughter, Fay—Fay Fausset, he called her. She was fourteen and I was only seven, but I was very fond of her all the same. We took to each other from the beginning. When we left London and went to The Hook, Fay went with us. I was ill there, and she helped to nurse me. She was very good to me—kinder than I can say, and I loved her as if she had been my sister. But when I got well she was sent away—sent to a finishing-school at Brussels, and I never saw her again. She had only lived with us one short summer. Yet it seemed as if she and I had been together all my life. I missed her sorely. I missed her for years afterwards.”
“My tender-hearted Mildred!” said Miss Fausset gently. “It was like you to give your love to a stranger, and to be so faithful to her memory!”
“O, but she was not a stranger! she was something nearer and dearer. I could hardly have been so fond of her if there had not been some link between us.”