“You may as well tell me. I don’t seem to be Yankee enough to be good at guessing.”
“A little daughter, as pretty a baby as ever was seen—of course, excepting Zoe’s and mine.”
“Oh, is that it?” laughed Walter. “Well, I’ll congratulate them when I see them. Am I uncle to it, mother?”
“No,” she replied with a smile; “you are not really related at all to either parent, so of course not to the child.”
“Yet both the parents and I have been in the habit of calling each other cousin, so I think I’ll claim kin with the little beauty you tell me of.”
“And I don’t think any one will object,” said his mother.
Zoe now joined them, welcomed Walter heartily, and the talk went on, principally about the various relatives and connections, but with never an unkind or uncharitable word in regard to any of them.
“And you had them all here to-day,” Walter said at length. “I wish I had reached home a few hours sooner.”
“We would all have been glad to see you then, as we are now, my son,” said his mother. “But don’t feel too much disappointed. I have an idea that there will be a number of other family gatherings before Max is ordered away again.”