Isabel Huntington was wondrously beautiful then, and Frederic Raymond was sorely tempted to bid her stay, not as Alice’s governess, nor yet as the daughter of his housekeeper, but as his wife and mistress of his house. Several times he tried to speak, and at last, crossing over to where she sat, he began—“Isabel, I have never heard that people were talking of you; there is no reason why they should, but if they are I can devise a method of stopping it and still keeping you with us. I have never spoken to you of—” love, he was going to say, and the graceful head was already bent to catch the sound, when a little voice chimed in, “Please, Frederic, I am here,” and looking up they saw before them Alice.
She had entered unobserved and was standing just within the door, where she heard what Frederic said. Intuitively she felt what would follow next, and scarcely knowing what she did, she had apprised them of her presence.
“The brat!” was Isabel’s mental comment, while Frederic was sensible of a feeling of relief, as if he had suddenly wakened from a spell, or been saved from some great peril. For several moments Isabel sat, hoping Alice would leave the room, but she did not, and in no very amiable mood the lady was herself constrained to go, by a call from her mother, who wished to see her on some trivial matter.
When she was gone, Alice groped her way to the sofa, and climbing upon it said to Frederic, “Won’t you read me that letter again which Mrs. Green wrote to you?”
He complied with her request, and when he had finished, the child continued, “If Marian had really died, wouldn’t she have sent some message to me, and wouldn’t that woman have told us how she happened to be way off there, and all about it?”
“If Marian really died!” repeated Frederic. “Do you doubt it?”
“Yes,” returned the child, “Marian loved me most as well as she did you, and she surely would have talked of me and sent me some word; then, too, if there much difference between scarlet fever and canker-rash? Don’t some folks call it by both names?”
“I believe they do,” said Frederic, wondering to what all this was tending.
“Marian had the scarlet fever, and I, too, just after I came here,” was Alice’s next remark. “You were at college, but I remember it, and so does Dinah, for I asked her a little while ago. Can folks have it twice?” and the blind eyes looked up at Frederic, as if sure that this last argument at least were proof conclusive of Marian’s existence.
“Sometimes, but not often,” answered Frederic, the shadow of a doubt creeping into his own mind.