“Roy Mason!” she exclaimed, “You must not kiss and squeeze me the way you are doing, and I not able to get away, with my hair all snarled up in your buttons. It is mean in you, and I’ll call mother if you don’t stop. I believe she is in the next room, listening, perhaps.”
“Let her listen. She was young once,” Roy said, going on very deliberately, while Fanny, from necessity, lay passive on his arm.
When the hair business was settled she moved away from him, and picking up a cushion put it between them again.
“I was telling you about Judge Prescott, whom I called my father, although now I have a faint recollection of a time when there was no gentleman in our house,” she said. “When he died mother told me everything. I don’t think she meant to tell me the whole dreadful story, but she gave some hints and I would not let her stop. I said I’d go to Ridgefield and inquire, and so she had to tell me, and if there is more to know I do not care to hear it. I feel now as if my life had been all a lie. Fanny Prescott, indeed! When I am really Fanny Hilton, and that is not the worst of it. Stop, Roy! You shall not touch me again till I’m through,” she said, as Roy’s arm came over the cushion toward her hand.
“Did you ever hear of a haunted house in Ridgefield, where a woman in a white gown and blue ribbons walks at night and a drowning man calls for ’Tina. That’s the woman’s name, and she sat still and let him drown, and a baby cries at all hours for its mother? That is ’Tina, too,—who—who—was hung!”
“By Jove, that’s a corker for a story!” Roy replied. “I never heard of it before, but I like haunted houses, with women in white and blue ribbons and cries for ’Tina, who was hung! Tell me about it, and what it has to do with you.”
In as few words as possible Fanny told the story of the Dalton tragedy as she had heard it from her mother, while Roy listened with absorbing interest.
“What do you think now of the great-great-granddaughter of ’Tina?” Fanny asked when the story was ended.
“I think her the sweetest, dearest little girl in all the world, and do not care a continental for the woman in white and blue ribbons, or the haunted house. You say there is only a cellar hole there now and that it belongs to you or your mother,” Roy answered, throwing the cushion half way across the room and putting both arms around Fanny, who was crying, but who sat very still while he went on, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do when we are married. We will build a pretty cottage there,—a real up to date one, with bay windows and wide piazzas and give ’Tina a chance to perambulate under cover rainy nights. You say she takes such times to walk in preference to pleasant weather. I should think that white dress would be rather frayed and draggled and the blue ribbons slimpsy by this time.”
He was making light of the matter and a load was lifted from Fanny’s heart, for she had dreaded telling him the story which had weighed so heavily upon her since she heard it.