"It's funny, father, but I hadn't thought till then that grown people had quarrels. I might have known it from the story of the Forest; I remembered that afterward, and how things all came right."
"Poor little girl! You should have been warned; and yet in spite of it you have learned that realities are better than dreams."
"Father," Rosalind asked abruptly, "why was it you did not come to Friendship for so many years? Did not grandmamma like my mother? I think I ought to know."
Mr. Whittredge smiled at the womanly seriousness of the lifted face. "I think you ought, dear," he answered.
With her hand clasped in his he told her the story briefly, for even now he could not dwell upon it without pain, and as Rosalind listened she discovered that she had already heard a bit of it from Mrs. Parton and Mrs. Molesworth at the auction.
"We must try, you and I, not to think too hardly of grandmamma now. She has suffered a great deal, and it was your mother's earnest wish that the trouble might be healed if the opportunity ever came." Patterson said nothing of his own struggle to forgive his mother's attitude toward his young wife.
"I think, father," Rosalind said, "that perhaps grandmamma is sorry. One day, not long ago, I saw her looking at mother's picture. She did not know I was there. She took it from the table and held it in her hand, and I am sure she was crying a little."
That was a happy day, for now they put aside sad memories, and turned to the merry side of life, Rosalind kept forgetting that her father had been in Friendship before, and continued to point out objects of interest with which he had been familiar long before she was born. So full were the hours that it was growing dusk when they turned into Church Lane to call on the magician.