Alice had decided to go to her own home proper at Uncle Calvert’s, and Gertie was alone with Miss Rossiter, who gave her the room near hers, where Alice slept when she was there.
And here, late in the day, Colonel Schuyler came, and was brought up by Miss Rossiter, who withdrew and left him alone with Gertie.
She was pale as marble, save where two bright red spots burned on her cheeks, and her eyes were heavy as lead, but they brightened with eagerness and excitement when the colonel came in and drew his chair beside her as she lay upon the couch.
“Don’t try to rise,” he said, as she made an effort to sit up. “You are too tired and worn; keep as you are while I am talking to you. Gertie, it is a very strange story I am about to tell you, and that it may come to you by degrees, I will tell you first why we went to England so suddenly, and that when we went we had no thought of you, or that we should discover who you were. We were hunting for another child.”
Gertie was looking steadily at him, and her eyes never left his face while he told her the story, beginning with the time when he first asked Edith to be his wife, and she hinted at a page of her life of which she wished to tell him, and which after so many years, had come to him by accident.
“I have the letter with me,” he said; “I brought it on purpose to read to you, as it will tell the story so much better than I can.”
Taking out Edith’s letter he read it aloud, while Gertie’s eyes deepened their gaze upon his face, and the red all died from her cheeks, which were of an ashen hue, as when the letter was finished, he went on to tell how the child was not dead, as Edith had supposed, and of their search in London, which they gave at last into the hands of the police.
“Then, while we were waiting,” he said, “I thought to make some inquiries about you at the office where your annuity is paid. There I heard of a Mrs. Westbrooke, recently from Florence, and to her we went, hoping she might know something of you, and she did. She was the second wife of the man who was not your father, but whose first wife adopted you when her own baby died. Her maid, Mary Stover, afterward Mrs. Rogers, told her of you, and brought you to her from her mother, who had taken you from the —— Street Foundling Hospital, where you had been left on the steps, and where Mary Stover’s sister Anne was at that time nurse.
“Gertie, are you going to faint? Do you hear me? Do you understand?” the colonel asked, alarmed at the expression of the face still confronting him so steadily, and never moving a muscle any more than if the features had been chiselled in stone.
“Yes, I think—I understand,” came huskily from the livid lips, “that baby, born in Dorset Street, and left on the hospital steps, and hunted for by you—and—and—her—was—was—I, and she—your—Mrs. Schuyler—is—my mother—and that—that grave I’ve tended always—is—is my father’s!”