Bab walked straight to her.
"I am Barbara—Barbara Wynne," she said. "You've come to see me, I suppose?"
Varick, puzzled, looked from one to the other in his wonder. As yet he grasped nothing of what was going on. "Why, what is it?" he murmured to Miss Elvira. By now, however, that lady had forgotten that Varick even existed. With a jab at her bonnet, her hard old face twitching queerly, she suddenly threw out both her hands.
"Come here, girl," said Miss Elvira thickly, her voice cracking as she spoke; "you know me, don't you? I'm your father's aunt—yours too. I've come to take you home."
Late that night, long after the dinner hour at Mrs. Tilney's, the news of what had happened ran from room to room. To say the boarding house was stupefied but barely expresses it. The story read like a fairy tale.
It was told, for example, how twenty years before, old man Beeston's son, against his father's will, had married an insignificant nobody—a girl without either wealth or position. Disowned, then disinherited, the son as well as the woman he'd married had disappeared. It was as if the grave had swallowed them. Which, indeed, had been the case, as both the man and his girl wife were dead. A child, however, had survived them, and that child was Bab. Picture the sensation at Mrs. Tilney's!
"Well, talk of luck!" remarked Miss Hultz, who had been among the first to hear the news. "She can have anything she wants now!" A thought at this instant entering her mind, she gave a sudden exclamation. "Why, she can even have Mr. Varick!" There seemed no reason to doubt it.
In Mrs. Tilney's house, it happened, was one person who did not share Miss Hultz' view. This was Varick himself!
Eleven o'clock had struck and Bab, with her little handbag packed, her face white, had been whirled away uptown in the Beestons' big limousine. Mrs. Tilney, too, had made her exit. Her gaunt face drawn and grim, she sat in her bedroom staring into the cold, burned-out grate. Its ashes seemed somehow to typify her sense of desolation, of loneliness; for, as she reflected, Bab was gone, Bab was no longer hers. How swift it all had been! How unexpected! However, with that fortitude bred of a long familiarity with fate—or call it fortune if you like—Mrs. Tilney accepted dry-eyed this last gift it offered; and with a sigh she arose and made ready for bed.
Meanwhile, on the floor above, Varick had just knocked at Mr. Mapleson's door. His face was a study. All the color had left it until he was white, ash pale, and his gray eyes were clouded darkly.