It was as follows:
“Dear Grandma:
“You must let me call you that just this once, though you are not my grandmother. A dreadful thing has been done, and kept secret until yesterday, when I found it out, and it almost killed me. I am not the baby born at Rome; Margery is that baby; Margery is your grandchild, and I am nobody. I am the daughter of Frederick Hetherton and Mrs. La Rue, who was Christine Bodine, my old nurse. She has told me all the deception, and her hiding Margery from her father, who did not know of her existence. It is terrible—and I was so proud and hot tempered, and so bad to you sometimes, and now I’d give the world if you were really my grandmother.
“Come as soon as you can and see Margery and question Mrs. La Rue yourself.
“Queenie.”
“Not her gra’ma! I not her gra’ma! Who then is her gra’ma, I’d like to know?” Grandma Ferguson exclaimed, when Axie read the first lines of the letter.
But Axie did not answer. Her quick eye had gone rapidly on, and with an ejaculation of surprise, she read what Queenie had written, while her mistress turned white as ashes, and could only whisper her incredulity.
“Rennet not mine! not Margery’s child! No, no, I cannot believe that,” she said, and a sense of pain began to rise in her heart at the thought of losing in this way the little dark-eyed girl who had crept into her love in spite of her wilful, imperious ways. “Read it again, Axie,” she continued; “You did not get it right before. Rennet never said no such thing, unless she’s crazy. Yes, that’s it,” and grandma’s face brightened, and her voice was more cheery. “Fretting for Phil has driven her out of her mind. She hain’t slep’, nor cried, nor et sence he died. I shall go over there at once, and do you run as fast as you can to the livery after a hoss and sleigh.”
And so within an hour after Pierre delivered Queenie’s letter to Grandma Ferguson she was alighting at the door of Hetherton Place. Margery, who knew nothing of Pierre’s journey to the village, opened the door to the old lady, whose first exclamation was:
“How is she, and when did the spell come on her?”