"I never tried to resist you, Happie, but there may come a day when the legal claim will be useful," retorted Miss Keren. "I will dispense with the hyphens. Charlotte, as I was saying, to-morrow we will attend to my legal adoption of Happie. Then she will have a real claim on me. The first thing she would do if she had an income, she told me, would be to establish you in a house in idleness. I am not going to do that. But I am going to ask you to give up your position and come to look after an old woman whose dear and only daughter you are. Please don't interrupt me, Charlotte. You can't realize how close to my heart is this plan of mine! And for the other side of it, Charlotte, did you ever read good little books in your childhood in which the dutiful were rewarded and the naughty punished? I am not inclined to think your new life will be entirely free from annoyance, since I am moving you to Fifty-Eighth Street, and not to paradise. But I think it will be easier than braving the world daily as you now do. All these years, more than five, my girl, ever since your widowhood, I have watched you cheerfully, unflaggingly working for your children, teaching them, putting under foot and out of sight your own sorrow and weariness of body and mind. Dear Charlotte, like the good little girls in the story books your reward has come. We will go out of these little Patty-Pan rooms into our own home, and by and by, if our children—your children, and my grandchildren, dear daughter of Roland and Elizabeth,—leave us, we will live on together and you shall help me get ready to follow my two best beloved. It is all settled, Charlotte, and you cannot hesitate to take what good there is in it for you, remembering the good you will do me. And don't you suppose I enjoy being the channel through which you receive a little reward for your great courage and devotion?"
It was a long speech for terse Miss Keren, but she made it rapidly, and there were tears in her eyes and a quiver in her voice as she ended it with hands outstretched to Mrs. Scollard.
Margery sobbed under her breath, Happie walked swiftly to the window. Laura forgot her theme; her hands crashed down on the piano keys and her eyes overflowed with happy tears that sprang out of the warmest spot in her self-centred little heart as she heard her mother praised.
But Bob, who had listened with a face contorted by his efforts to appear unmoved, gave up the attempt at last. He crossed over to Miss Keren and lifted her bodily in his arms. He kissed her over and over again, and he was not ashamed that he made her cheeks wet from the contact with his own moist ones.
"Aunt Keren, you're dead right!" he cried. "You've got ahead of me in making a home for mother, but I don't grudge it to you! And if ever I forget what I owe you—for all our sakes—then I'm not Roland Spencer's grandson."
Miss Keren clasped the big boy close. He could not have thanked her in any words that would have warmed her heart like these. "You're his own boy, my Bob!" she said. "Girls, there isn't one earthly thing to cry about!" she added, shamelessly ignoring her own brimming eyes. "Gretta, you rival our Crestville brook! Next winter you are to be given an education, my girl, that will more than take the place of what the Barkers wanted to do for you! You are part of my plans, Gretta, and part of my family. Go to bed, children. This has been an exciting evening."
"Yes, let's turn in," agreed Bob, somewhat ashamed of his recent outburst. "And it's à bas, la Patty-Pans! is it?"
"No! Long live our Patty-Pans—it's overflowed, that's all!" cried Happie turning from the window. "It's 'Lochaber no more.' I wonder what that air is? Laura, you don't know?"
Laura shook her head. "But I could make a song, if you all would wait for me," she said.
"So can I—without waiting!" cried Happie in one of her poetic outbursts which Bob said "weren't real poetry, but were real inspiration," and she began to sing: