“Where’s my girl?” he inquired in his cordial, hearty voice. “Where’s Ethel Blue?”
Some one gave her a friendly push forward so her father did not notice the reluctance with which she had been almost creeping toward him. He threw his arm around her shoulders regardless of possible damage to the elegancies of her court costume, and kissed her heartily. The tears shone in her eyes as she forced herself to meet his searching gaze.
“Not crying!” he whispered in her ear, and she felt her heart give a real pang as the happiness left his face and was replaced by his old look of sorrow and endurance. “Not crying!” he repeated in her ear. “Why, I thought you loved her! You’ve done nothing but write to me about Miss Daisy all summer!”
“About Miss Daisy? Do you mean—? Is it Miss Daisy?”
“It certainly is Miss Daisy. Here, come behind the curtain,” and he swept his daughter and his fiancée out of sight of the retiring audience. “It is Daisy Graham who is to be your dear mother, my little Ethel Blue. Are you satisfied now?”
“O, Father! O, Miss Daisy!” cried Ethel Blue, sobbing now from relief and joy and clinging to both of them; “I never guessed it! It’s too wonderful to be true!”
CHAPTER XVII
THE PARTING BREAKFAST
Ethel Blue’s change of mind about stepmothers was so complete that her cousins would have joked her about it except that her Aunt Marion advised them to say nothing to her on a subject that had once been so sore a theme.
“Don’t recall those painful thoughts,” she advised. “Ethel Blue will be happier and certainly Miss Daisy will be if the present mood continues.”
“I thought you couldn’t help loving her when you knew her,” Captain Morton had said to Ethel Blue. “That’s why I was willing to postpone the wedding all summer so that you and she might have a chance to become really well acquainted.”