"P. S.—Uncle said this afternoon, when I begged him to start with me right away to join you in Europe, that if it were not for some matters needing his presence here, we might go; but that he cannot possibly leave at present. Dear Uncle! I'll be glad when morning comes, so that I may put my arms around his neck and be his own cheerful Dorry again. Liddy does not know yet that I have heard anything. I forgot to say that Mr. and Mrs. Manning are going to California, and that Josie is to spend two months with me. Won't that be a comfort? How strange it will seem to have a secret from her! But Uncle says I must wait.
"P. S. again.—Be sure to answer this in English. I know we agreed to correspond in French, for the sake of the practice, but I have no heart for it now. It is too hard work. Good-night, once more. The storm is over. Your loving
Dorry."
CHAPTER XXXI.
ONLY A BIT OF RAG.
Dorry's long letter reached Donald two weeks later, as he sat in his room at a hotel in Aix-la-Chapelle. He had been feeling lonely and rather discouraged, notwithstanding the many sights that had interested him during the day. And after many disappointments and necessary delays in the prosecution of the business that had taken him across the sea, he had begun to feel that, perhaps, it would be just as well to sail for home and let things go on as before. Dorry, he thought, need never know of the doubts and anxieties that had troubled Uncle George and himself, and for his part he would rest in his belief that he and she were Wolcott Reed's own children, joint heirs to the estate, and, as Liddy had so often called them, "the happiest pair of twins in the world."
But Dot's letter changed everything. Now that she knew all, he would not rest a day even, till her identity was proved beyond a possibility of doubt. But how to do it? No matter; do it he would, if it were in the power of man. (Donald in these days felt at least twenty years old.) Dorry's words had fired his courage anew. As he looked out upon the starry night, over the roof-peaks of the quaint old city, he felt like a Crusader, and Dorothy's happiness was his Holy-land, to be rescued from all invaders. The spirit of grand old Charlemagne, whose bones were in the Cathedral close by, was not more resolute than Donald's was now.
All this and more he told her in his letter written that night, but the "more" did not include the experiences of the past twelve hours of daylight. He did not tell her how he had that day, with much difficulty, found the Prussian physician who had attended his father, Wolcott Reed, in his last illness, and how very hard it had been to make the old man even remember the family, and how little information, after all, he had been able to obtain.
"Vifteen year vas a long dime, eh?" the doctor had said in his broken English, and as for "dose dwin bapies," he could recall "nod-ings aboud dot at all."