"I'm so thankful it's you!" she exclaimed with a smile that relieved the tension of the meeting. "I like you so much better than any of the other Mrs. Smiths we have met this morning!"
"I guessed, of course, from your boys' names, that you were my brother's wife," said the newly found sister, sinking into a chair; "but the children said there was no chance of their father or their uncle coming North this summer, and you never had seen me, so I took the risk of staying on until the first of September when my engagement at the art store ends."
"Why didn't you tell me, Louise? It would have been such a happiness to me—to the children—to know. We've been defrauded of nearly two months' joy."
"I shall be going in a week or ten days more," stammered Mrs. Smith, looking at her brother.
"You can tell me your plans later," he answered, "but don't look at me as if I were driving you. Why, I came up here from Vera Cruz to find you and for no other purpose."
"You found a clue there?"
The slender woman seemed to shrink into her chair, her high-piled white hair shining against its red back and her eyes gleaming with tears.
He told her how he had come upon her picture.
"Did the Mexican tell you that my husband was shot there? My little Dorothy wakes even now in the night and thinks she hears voices whispering in the patio under her window, voices of the men that called her father out to his death."
"We can all help make her happy enough to forget the hard days—and you, too, dear Louise."