“Do you mean Reinette, and how did you know anything ailed her?” Margery asked, and grandma replied:
“How do I know? Didn’t that Frenchman fetch me a letter from her this mornin’, in which she said she wasn’t my granddarter, and that——”
Here grandma stopped, struck by the likeness to her daughter which had so impressed her the first time she saw Margery. She had paid no attention to the assertion in Reinette’s letter that Margery was her granddaughter, but now, as she looked into the blue eyes confronting her so steadily, she saw there something which awoke within her a strange feeling of kinship and love, and she continued with a faltering voice: “She said that you was Margaret’s girl. Be you Margery? Be you my granddarter?”
“I don’t know, the story seems so incredible,” Margery replied, but she took the hands extended toward her in her own, and covered them with kisses, as she continued: “If I am Margery Hetherton, it is very hard on Queenie, and you must love her just the same—love her better if possible.”
“Yes, yes,” grandma replied. “Nothing shall change my love for her. Where is she? Let me go to her at once.”
Queenie, who was lying on the lounge, must have been almost asleep, for she heard nothing until a hand was laid gently upon her head, and a voice full of love and pity said to her:
“Rennet! poor little Rennet!”
Then she started up, with a low cry, caused partly by surprise and partly by the sharp pain which seemed to pass from her heart to her head and to force to the surface the tears which had been so long pent up, and which now fell like rain. She had never before heard her grandmother call her “Rennet” without a feeling of irritation, or, as she had expressed it to Phil, without a “jerking of her elbows,” but now, as the familiar sound fell on her ears, there swept over her such a feeling of anguish, and regret, and intense longing for what she had lost, that the fountain of tears was broken up, and for some minutes she lay in the motherly arms held out to her, and cried so hard and piteously that Mrs. Ferguson became alarmed at last, and tried to soothe and quiet her. But Reinette could not be quieted.
“Let me cry,” she said; “it does me good. You know I have not shed a tear before since poor Phil died, and I guess I am crying more for him than for my lost birthright—my——”
“Hush, Rennet;” grandma interrupted. “I don’t know what you mean—don’t want to know—and if there is anything, my advice is, keep it to yourself. I took you to my heart as my own that fust day I saw you at the train, a little scart thing among so many strangers. I loved you then; I’ve loved you ever sence, and allus will, no matter who you be.”