Meantime Robert Macpherson was puzzling himself over Gertie’s face and its resemblance to another.
“How can they be so like, and yet nothing to each other?” he said, and once, when an opportunity occurred, he questioned the child closely with regard to her antecedents, but elicited little more information than she had already given Godfrey in his hearing.
“She was Gertie Westbrooke, born in London, January —, 18—. She had lived for a while in a big house, with her mother, whom she could just remember, and who died when she was two years old, and then a new mother came, who was very cross, and Mary Rogers, her nurse, took her away, and had been so good to her ever since.”
“And your father?” Robert asked. “Where is he? Do you never see him?”
“He was cross, too, and drank too much wine,” Gertie said; “and auntie says he’s dead, and I guess I hain’t any relatives now, but a grandmother, and I don’t know where she is. I heard auntie tell a woman once that I had a history stranger than a story-book, but when I asked her about it she looked cross, and bade me never listen, and said if there was anything I ought to know, she would surely tell me. Sometimes when I see grand people, I think, maybe, I am one of them, for I feel just as they act, and could act just like them, if I tried.”
“Maybe you are a princess in disguise,” Robert said, laying his hand kindly on the bright flowing hair. “Gertie, do you know you are the very image of the only sister I ever had? Dorothea was the name, but I called her Dora, and loved her so much.”
“And she died?” Gertie said, guessing the fact from the tremor in the young man’s voice and the moisture in his eyes.
“Yes, she died, and I have no picture of her, and that is why I wanted you to sit for me. You are so much like her. Maybe if you tell your aunt the reason she will allow it when we reach America. I am going to Hampstead, too, for a time, to visit Mr. Godfrey. Will you speak to her about it?”
Gertie promised that she would, and kept her word, and Mrs. Rogers said she would see, which Gertie took as an affirmative reply and reported to the young man, telling him, too, that auntie had forbidden her to talk much with him, and telling Godfrey that he must not come where she was, for auntie did not like it, and said it was “no good.”
“And I didn’t tell her, either, that you kissed me; if I had, she would have been angry, and maybe shut me up in that close, dark stateroom; but you are never to do it again.”