Alice stared, open-mouthed. "Why, Lute!" she said—"why, but that must be my mother!"
Lute shook his head. "I don't think there's anything in it. Do you, Mrs. Gray?"
"Might be," she said, briefly.
Alice took the crumpled cutting, and holding it under the lamp, read it through to herself. "But, Lute, really and truly," she said, "it is queer. Perhaps some of my mother's rich relations have left her a fortune! Then we could pay off the mortgage. Only I'm afraid my mother hadn't any rich relations—or poor ones, either. I never heard of any. Did you, Mrs. Gray?"
"No," Rebecca said.
"She was a governess, you know, Lute, in some horrid English family; the wife didn't like her, and she discharged my poor little mother; then the family went off and left her all alone in Germany. Perfectly abominable!"
"Don't be unjust, Alice; you don't know anything about it," Mrs. Gray said. "She was very young. Perhaps she couldn't teach the children to suit their parents. Though it was unkind to leave her unprovided for," she added, with painful fairness.
"I guess it was!" cried Alice. "Oh, how angry father gets when he talks about it! He says she was in such terror, poor little thing, when he met her. And yet she was very forgiving, father says. He says she wrote and told the gentleman that she was married. I wouldn't have. I'd have let him think I'd starved, so he would have suffered remorse—the wretch!"
"I hope you would not have been so foolish or so selfish," her step-mother said.
"You see, she had no relations to turn to," Alice explained to Luther; "if father hadn't come, dear knows what would have become of her."