For a moment, however, she could not, and she lay perfectly still with the light of a great and unutterable happiness shining in her eyes and illuminating every feature.
“Edith, darling, you are very glad?” the colonel asked at last.
“Yes, Howard, so glad, oh, so glad;” Edith replied. “God has been so good to me, so good that I never can thank Him enough. That Gertie should be my daughter and living with me all the time; oh, God, I do thank Thee, I do. Howard, you are glad too, glad for Gertie?”
She questioned him eagerly, and he answered her without the slightest hesitancy:
“Yes, Edith, very glad.”
And he was glad, and when, as he was leaving Mrs. Westbrooke, that lady said to him, “Pardon me, if I seem curious, but what is the girl Gertie to this lady?” he promptly answered: “Gertie is our daughter,” and with that little pronoun our he adopted Gertie into his heart and love, and felt that she was his as well as Edith’s.
“Our daughter!” That was what he called her to his wife, who clasped her arms around his neck in token that she appreciated this last great kindness of his.
Then they talked together of the beautiful girl whom they had come so far to seek, when all the time she was a part of their own household, and as they talked there naturally enough crept into Edith’s mind the shadow of a fear, lest, after all, there might be some mistake. But there was none apparently, for the colonel made every inquiry possible with regard to Mary Rogers, finding beyond a doubt that she was Mary Stover, and that her sister Anne had been a nurse in —— Street Hospital nineteen years before, and that it was by their mother, then living in Dorset Street, that the child was taken when it left the hospital. There could be no doubt, and as Edith was far too weak and too much overcome to undertake the journey home immediately, the colonel decided to remain a week or two in London, and wrote at once to Glenthorpe, asking Robert to bring Emma to them, but reserving the secret of Gertie’s birth until they came. Then he wrote to Gertie herself, but thought it better not to confide the whole to her until he saw her face to face. So he merely said that being in London he had thought it well to make some inquiries at the —— Bank, and, if possible, discover something of her family.
“And dear Gertie,” he wrote, “you will be no less astonished and delighted than I was to find that beyond the shadow of a doubt you are our own daughter. I cannot tell you all on paper. I only assure you that it is true, and when we return I will explain it to you. Mrs. Schuyler is not very well, but I hope she will be able to return in the Cuba, which sails in two weeks. With love and a kiss for little Arthur, who, I trust, is well, I am,
“Your affectionate father, H. Schuyler.”