"Grandpa, I will not interrupt you again," she said. "I will sit here quite still, and listen. Now tell me all my mother's story."
She kept her word.
After he had told her all he had to tell, and she knew the whole tragic story of her mother's disgrace, she still sat there silently, with her dark eyes bent on her clasped hands.
The cloud of shame and disgrace seemed to lower upon her head with the weight of the whole world.
"You understand all I have told, my child?" he said to her, after waiting vainly for her to speak.
She put her small hand to her head in a dazed, uncertain way.
"Oh, yes, I think so," she replied. "But my head seems in a whirl. I will ask you just a few questions, grandpa, to make sure that I have understood."
And then she seemed to fall into a "brown study." When she had collected her thoughts a little she began to question him.
"I think you said that my mother eloped at sixteen with a handsome stranger whose acquaintance she had casually made in her long, lonely rambles in the woods. In a few weeks she wrote to you from New York that she was happily married. Am I right, grandpa?"
"Yes," he replied.