“Are you my mother’s sister?” the girl asked solemnly.
The stranger raised her head again, with a look which Dora did not understand. Her eyes were full of tears, and of a wistful appeal which said nothing to the creature to whom it was addressed. After a moment, with a pathetic cry of pain and self-abandonment, she breathed forth a scarcely intelligible “Yes".
“Then now I know,” said Dora, in a more satisfied tone. She was not without emotion herself. It was impossible to see so much feeling and not to be more or less affected by it, even when one did not understand, or even felt it to be extreme. “Then I will call you aunt, and we shall know where we are,” she added. “I am very glad to have relations, as everybody has them. May I mention you to father? It must be long since you quarrelled, whatever it was about. I shall say to him: ‘You need not take any notice, but I am glad, very glad, to have an aunt like other girls’.”
“No, no, no, no—not to him! You must not say a word.”
“I don’t know how I can keep a secret from father,” Dora said.
“Oh, child,” cried the lady, “do not be too hard on us! It would be hard for him, too, and he has been ill. Don’t say a word to him—for his own sake!”
“It will be very strange to keep a secret from father,” Dora said reflectively. Then she added: “To be sure, there have been other things—about the nurses, and all that. And he is still very weak. I will not mention it, since you say it is for his own sake.”
“For we could never meet—never, never!” cried the lady, with her head on Dora’s breast—“never, unless perhaps one of us were dying. I could never look him in the face, though perhaps if I were dying—— Dora, kiss your poor—your poor, poor—relation. Oh, my child! oh, my darling! kiss me as that!”
“Dear aunt,” said Dora quietly. She spoke in a very subdued tone, in order to keep down the quite uncalled-for excitement and almost passion in the other’s voice. She could not but feel that her new relation was a person with very little self-control, expressing herself far too strongly, with repetitions and outcries quite uncalled for in ordinary conversation, and that it was her, Dora’s, business to exercise a mollifying influence. “This is for you,” she said, touching the sallow, thin cheek with her young rosy lips. “And this is for poor mamma—poor young mamma, whom I never saw.”
The lady gave a quick cry, and clutched the girl in her trembling arms.