The question was so sudden that I was taken quite aback, while conscious guilt, if I can call it that, added to my embarrassment. It was three weeks since Grant came home, and in that time we had made rapid strides towards something warmer than friendship. We had ridden and driven together for miles around the country, had played and sung together, and walked together through the spacious grounds, and once when we sat in the summer-house and I had told him of my father’s and mother’s death and my life in Meadowbrook and Wellesley, and how lonely I had sometimes been because no one cared for me, he had put his arm around me, and, kissing my forehead, had said, “Poor little Dorey! I wish I had known you were at Wellesley. You should never have been lonely;” and then he told me that he had seen me twice in Boston, once at a concert and once in a street-car, and had never forgotten my face, which he thought beautiful, and that he had called me his Lost Star, whom he had looked for so long and found at last. And as he talked I had listened with a heart so full of happiness that I could not speak, although with the happiness there was a pang of remorse when I remembered what Aunt Keziah had said about my not trying to win Grant’s love. And I was not trying; the fault, if there were any, was on his side, and probably he meant nothing. At all events, the scene in the summer-house was not repeated, and I fancied that Grant’s manner after it was somewhat constrained, as if he were a little sorry. But he had kissed me and told me I was beautiful, and when Thea put the question to me direct, I stammered out at last, “Ye-es, Grant thinks I am handsome.”
“Of course he does. How can he help it? And I don’t mind, even if we are engaged.”
“Engaged!” I repeated, and drew back from her a little, for, although I had suspected the engagement, I had never been able to draw from my aunts any allusion to it or admission of it, and I had almost made myself believe that there was none.
But I knew it now, and for a moment I felt as if I were smothering, while Thea regarded me curiously, but with no jealousy or anger in her gaze.
“You are surprised,” she said at last. “Has neither of the aunts told you?”
“No,” I replied, “they have not, but I have sometimes suspected it. And I have reason to think that such a marriage would please Aunt Kizzy very much. Let me congratulate you.”
“You needn’t,” she said, a little stiffly. “It is all a made-up affair. Shall I tell you about myself?” And, drawing me close to her again, she told me that at a very early age she became an orphan, with a large fortune as a certainty when she was twenty-one, as she would be at Christmas, and another fortune coming to her in the spring, if she did not marry Grant, and half in case she did. “It’s an awful muddle,” she continued, “and you can’t understand it. I don’t either, except that one of my ancestors, old Amos Hepburn, of Keswick, England, made a queer will, or condition, or something, by which the Mortons will lose their home unless I marry Grant, which is not a bad thing to do. I have known him all my life, and like him so much; and it is not a bad thing for him to marry me, either. Better do that than lose his home.”
“Would he marry you just for money?” I asked, while the spot on my forehead, which he had kissed, burned so that I thought she must see it.
But she was brushing her long hair and twisting it into braids, and did not look at me as she went on rapidly: “No, I don’t think he would marry me for my money unless he liked me some. Aleck wouldn’t, and Grant thinks himself vastly superior to Aleck, whom he calls a bore and a crank; and perhaps he is, but he is very nice,—not handsome like Grant, and not like him in anything. He has reddish hair, and freckles on his nose, and big hands, and wears awful baggy clothes, and scolds me a good deal, which Grant never does, and tells me I am fast and slangy, and that I powder too much. He is my second cousin, you know, and stands next to me in the Hepburn line, and if I should die he would come in for the Morton estate, unless he finds the missing link, as he calls it, which is ahead of us both. I am sure you will like him, and I shall be so glad when he comes. I am not half as silly with him as I am without him, because I am a little afraid of him, and I miss him so much.”
As I knew nothing of Aleck, I did not reply, and after a moment, during which she finished braiding her hair and began to do up her bangs in curl-papers, she said, abruptly, “Why don’t you speak? Don’t you tumble?”