Amy was the first to recover herself. Turning Eloise around and examining her minutely, she said, "I thought you dead. He told me so, and everything has been a blank to me since."
"You see she is my mother!" Eloise said to the Colonel; "and if she is your daughter, you must be my grandfather!"
If the Colonel had been carved in stone he could not have sat more motionless than he did, giving no sign that he heard.
"No matter! I shall find it all out for myself," Eloise continued, as she turned again to her mother, who was examining the red cloak as if she wondered how it came there.
The mention of "finding it out" affected the Colonel more than anything else had done. Amy had said the same thing to him once. She had not found it out, but this slip of a girl would, he was sure, and with something like a groan he sank back in his chair with a call for Peter.
"Take them away," he said huskily. "I can't bear any more, and,—and,—the girl must stay, if Amy wants her, and bring me a hot-water bag,—two of them,—I was never so cold in my life."
Peter nodded that he understood, and, ringing the bell for Amy's maid, bade her take her mistress to her room, and the young lady, too. "She is Mrs. Amy's daughter," he added.
There was no need to tell this, for Mrs. Biggs had done her duty, and every servant in the house had heard the news and was anxious to see the stranger. Amy was always at her best in her own room, where Sarah left her alone with Eloise, and hastened away to gossip with Mrs. Biggs and Peter. The shock, instead of making Amy worse, had for the time being cleared her brain to some extent, so that she was able to talk quite rationally to Eloise, whose first question was why she had thought her dead. "I was so homesick for you, and cried so much after you went away that he was angry and hard with me,—very hard,—and I said at last if he didn't send for you I'd never sing again, and meant it, too," Amy replied. "It was at Los Angeles on a concert night. I must have been pretty bad, and he seemed half afraid of me, and finally told me you were dead, and had been for three weeks, and that he had meant to keep it from me till the season was over. I believed him, and something snapped in my head and let in a pain and noise which have never left it; but they will now I have found you. I went before the footlights once that night, and the stage was full of coffins in which you lay, and I saw the little grave in the New England cemetery where he said you were buried. At last I fainted, and have never sung again. They were very kind to me at Dr. Haynes's, where he came often to see me till I heard he was dead. I was not sorry; he had been so,—so—I can't explain."
"I know," Eloise said, remembering her father's manner toward this weak, timid woman, who went on: "Then Col. Crompton came and brought me home. I used to live here years ago and called him father, till he said he was not my father. I never told you of him, or that this was once my home, although I described the place to you as something I had seen. If he were not my father I did not want to know who was, and did not want to talk about it, and after I married Mr. Smith it was very dreadful. He hated the Colonel when he found he could not get money from him, and sometimes taunted me with my birth, saying I was a Harris and a Cracker; but the cruelest of all was telling me you were dead. Why did he do it?"
"I think your fretting for me irritated him, and he feared you might never sing again unless he sent for me, and he did not want me," Eloise said. "He never wanted me. He was a bad man, and I could not feel sorry when he died."