"How?" said Regina, anxiously. "You don't think he's ill?"
"No," said Tib, "though he does look very pale. But his face seems older and yet younger. It has got a sort of softer look, as if at last he wasn't going to fight against himself anymore, but that it has tired him."
"Yes," said Regina, "I understand. Then you understand now—you and Gussie?"
"Yes," we answered. "Mrs. Munt has told us a great deal. But there are some things only you can tell us, and we want dreadfully to ask you."
"Fire away," said Regina, and she did so laugh when we didn't understand her; for, of course, though she had never had any brothers or sisters, she hadn't lived the shut-up way we had done.
"We want to know," we began, "how you knew about us going to the—the Old House, and how you knew our names and about us altogether."
"It was Charlie Truro that told me about you," she said. "He is my cousin as much—no, a good deal more—than he is yours, and we have always been a great deal together. He has known what a terrible sorrow it was to mamma to be estranged from her only brother, and he and I have often planned what we could do. We were very glad when Uncle Gerald agreed to take him as a sort of secretary for a while—it seemed a sort of beginning."
"I wonder grandpapa ever did," I said. "Wasn't it rather a wonder? For he knew he was a near cousin of yours, I suppose?"
"Yes," said Regina, "but it came about naturally enough, through some friends who had no connection with us. And once he had seen Charlie, Uncle Gerald seems to have taken a fancy to him. We came down here to stay at the Rectory, not knowing any one was at Rosebuds. Your coming was kept very quiet. Then Charlie told us of it, when he wrote, and when he came down here he managed to come to see us one day—a Sunday it was—at the Rectory, and told us all about you. And to me, though to no one else, he told of your funny trouble, about having got into the Old House and wondering if it was naughty, and then we planned together—he and I—that I should meet you there. I don't know exactly what I hoped for—I think Charlie had a vague idea that some day Uncle Gerald might see me, and that—with me being so like mamma—it might do some good. But we hadn't fixed anything, we meant to talk it all over the next time he came—to-day, that is. He little thought he would find it all done when he came."
"Won't he be surprised!" I said.