This he reported to Edith, who roused herself to some interest in the matter after being assured that no parent or guardian could take Gertie from them after all these years.
“If I thought they could I would not try to find them, for I can’t give Gertie up,” she said; while her husband felt that he would be almost as loath to part with Gertie as Edith herself.
And so with more real interest now than he had felt when searching for Mary Stover, he drove with Edith one day to the handsome lodgings occupied by Mrs. William Westbrooke, recently from Florence. She was a little, pale, sandy-haired woman, of forty or thereabouts, very much dressed, and having in her manner something haughty and supercilious as she received the strangers, and, without requesting them to be seated, asked what she could do for them.
It was the colonel who did the talking this time, while Edith listened in a preoccupied kind of way, which, nevertheless, did not prevent her from hearing all that was said.
“We are Americans,” the colonel began, “and we have a young girl in our family of whose antecedents we would learn something. As you have the same name, and bank at the same firm where her annuity of forty pounds a year is paid, it occurred to me to inquire if you have ever heard of a girl called Gertie, or Gertrude Westbrooke, nineteen or twenty years old.”
“Gertie!—Gertrude!” Mrs. Westbrooke said. “I did know a child by that name years ago; but tell me, please, how she came to be in America living with you?”
It was Edith who talked now, and who told rapidly all she knew of Gertie Westbrooke and her so-called mother, Mrs. Rogers.
“Is it the same? Do you think it the same?” she asked; and Mrs. Westbrooke replied:
“I think it the same; yes.”
“Who is she then? Are you her step-mother?” Edith asked; and, with a frown on her wizened little face, the lady replied: