It won his wife. "I shall not have to try," she answered.
"Are you willing to forget and begin again?—that is what we are going to do, is it not, Jack?" his aunt looked from his wife to him. "It will make a great difference in my life," she continued; "I have been very lonely, and I want this little girl;" she put her arm around Frances.
"Then she will certainly have to take us, too; won't she, Katherine?" and Mr. Morrison laughed happily.
Frances still seemed puzzled. "If this is my Aunt Frances—" she said slowly, "who is the little girl? Is she the Girl in the Golden Doorway, truly?—the portrait, I mean.
"I think she must be, and she is also your great-grandmother," her aunt replied.
"Then who is a Certain Person. You said he was abroad, father." Frances evidently thought it time all mysteries were solved.
"Why, yes, auntie, how does it happen you are not abroad? I heard last summer on the best authority that you would spend the winter in Egypt," said her nephew.
"I fully expected to be gone eighteen months when I left, but the death of the mother of my friend, Mrs. Roberts, changed our plans. I did not wish to go alone."
Frances was listening intently. "Father! you don't mean Aunt Frances is a Certain Person?" she cried. "I thought it was a man."
"It is a character we are going to forget. I am your father's aunt and yours, dear, and I am not Mrs. Marvin, but Mrs. Richards. Mrs. Marvin is my cousin. You understand it all now, don't you?"