All Mildred’s color had come back and her face was glowing with excitement as she took Alice’s hand; then unable to control herself, she threw her arms around the neck of the astonished girl and burst into a flood of tears, while Mr. Thornton looked on in dismay, dreading what might follow. He was himself beginning to think it a very foolish and unnatural thing to try to keep his wife’s identity from her people, but he was not a man to give up easily, and once in a dilemma of his own making he would stay in it at any cost.
“She is very tired and must go to her room,” he said to his daughter, who was crying herself, and holding Mildred’s hands in her own.
Had Mildred tried she could have done nothing better for her cause than she had done. Alice had been very doubtful as to whether she should like her new mother or not, but something in the eyes which looked so appealingly into hers, and in the tears she felt upon her cheek, and the clasp of the arms around the neck, disarmed all prejudice and made of her a friend at once. As for Gerard, he had never meant to be anything but friendly, and when the scene between the two ladies was over he came forward with the slow, quiet manner natural to him and said, “Now it is my turn to welcome Mrs. Thornton, who does not look as if she could have for a son a great six-footer like me. But I’ll call you mother, if you say so.”
“No, don’t,” Mildred answered, flashing on him a smile which made his heart beat rapidly and brought a thought of Bessie, who sometimes smiled like that.
Leading the way to Mildred’s rooms, Alice said, as she threw open the door, “I hope you will like them.”
“Like them! They are perfect,” was Mildred’s answer, as she walked through the apartments, feeling that it must be a dream from which she would bye-and-bye awaken. “And so many roses,” she said, stopping here and there over a bowl or cluster of them until, guided by the perfume, she came upon the pinks her mother had sent to her.
Taking up the glass she held it for an instant while Alice said, “June pinks, perhaps you do not have them in England. They are old-fashioned flowers, but very sweet. A friend of mine, Bessie Leach, brought them for you from her mother, who is blind.”
There was a low cry and a crash as the finger-glass fell to the floor and Mildred sank into the nearest chair, white as ashes, with a look in her eyes which startled and frightened Alice.
“It is the heat and fatigue of the voyage. I was very sea-sick,” Mildred said, trying to smile and recover herself, while Alice went for a towel to wipe up the water trickling over the carpet, and wondering if Mrs. Thornton was given to faintings and hysterics like this.
“She don’t look like it,” she thought, as she picked up and carried out the bits of glass and the pinks which had done the mischief.