"I'm sure I don't know what Happie is trying to tell me," she said with a whimsical twist of the lips. "She always talks so fast that I have to listen with every bit of me—I'm used to folks that talk slow, you know. But this time an automobile couldn't keep up with her! All I can make out is that Eunice told you something about this house being mine by rights, and that it worries you."
"You seem to have kept up pretty well, considering you haven't an automobile, Gretta," said Bob. "That's the story in a nutshell."
"I expect you to tell me all that you know of the matter, Gretta," said Miss Bradbury. "I have no particular desire to wrong any one, and I don't purpose beginning with you."
"I don't know one thing about it, Miss Bradbury, and that's the truth. All I have heard I have heard from Eunice, and you may be sure she didn't leave out much when she told you about it," said Gretta. "Everybody around here who knew her says my grandmother meant to have willed me this house, but there never was any will found, and that's all there is to it. There's no reason why you should leave—let—it worry you. I didn't get the house, and it's a good thing for me that you did, instead of somebody else."
"I shall certainly look into the matter thoroughly, and if the house is yours you shall have it as soon as I can deliver it. Then I'll rent it from you, if you will lease it to me," said Miss Bradbury with such a briskly ready air that it suggested a pen already in her hand with which to sign a lease.
Gretta laughed carelessly as she arose to go. "There isn't a single thing to find out, nor to talk about," she declared. "Eunice has tried to find out, but she didn't get at anything more than she knew before, and she would if there was anything to find out. She'd do more than get a house for me, to get rid of me! I guess I'll have to ask you to find me a place of some sort in the city next winter; I don't believe I can stay here."
The pretty face clouded and the dark eyes filled with tears. More painful to Gretta than the hard fact that she was homeless and resourceless was the injustice of her cousins' treatment of her, and that, do what she would, she could win no love from them, but was considered a burden and a nuisance.
"It's all coming out some way, Gretta!" cried Happie, throwing her arms around the girl so impulsively that the sunbonnet which she was just tying on flew across the room.
Bob picked up the bonnet and handed it to Gretta with a deep bow, hand on heart, in true colonial manner.
"Don't you worry, Gretta," he said. "We'll all go into business together in New York this winter. We've got so we feel you're one of the family—and I guess we feel as if we owned the Ark, instead of Aunt Keren! We wouldn't be willing to disembark from it, even to give it to you! This is a nice sort of place, after all."