CHAPTER XXX
"TWO, AND TWO, AND TWO"
It took but a little while for the Burnham household to settle down quietly to routine living; so easily, after all, does human nature adjust itself to tremendous strains and changes. Maybelle fitted into her place as though she had always been an acknowledged daughter of the house, come home after long absence. And the neighbors, even those morbidly curious ones, of which there are always a few in every community, took kindly to the new order of things and to the bright-faced stranger who rode and drove and walked and appeared in church with Erskine and his mother, and was introduced with punctilious care as "My wife's daughter, Miss Somerville."
They could not help, even from the first, saying kind and complimentary things about the beautiful young face, and after a few days of wonderment and conjecture they arranged their own story—with a very meagre array of facts to build upon—quite to their satisfaction.
"Oh, yes, I knew she was a widow when he married her; but I never heard of a child."
"Well, he married abroad, don't you know, and I suppose the girl just stayed on, with her relatives. Her mother must have been a mere child when she was first married; though this girl is very young, and Mrs. Burnham was probably older than she looked; for that matter, don't you know, I always said that she looked older than her husband? I suppose the girl has lived abroad all her life; that's what makes her look different, some way, from American girls, though her mother was born in this country, she told me so. Still, the girl would have English ways, of course, always living there. Did you hear her say the other day that the Somerville brothers, great English bankers that Ned Lake was asking her about, were her uncles?"
"It seems hard that the poor girl couldn't have been with her mother before she died," said one whose interests ran naturally in other channels than those of ages and pedigrees.
"Yes, it does," chimed in another home-keeping and home-loving matron, "but then her death was awfully sudden. Erskine's mother told me that they had no idea of her dying up to the very day; and I guess the girl has been separated from her a good deal. I have heard somewhere, and I am sure I don't remember where, that there was a fuss of some sort in the family. Probably her first husband's people didn't like the idea of her going into society and marrying again, especially marrying an American; English people are queer about some things, I have heard; I suppose they held on to the girl as long as they could."
Thus, with supposition and surmise, and a stray fact now and then, and vague remembrances, the story was worked over and shaped and pieced until it suited them. Meantime, the Burnham family went quietly on its way, having no confidants, and, while they spoke only truth when they spoke at all, judging it not necessary to tell the whole truth to any.
So quiet and peace settled once more upon Ruth Burnham's home, and it was proved again, as it often is, that a new grave in the family burial ground is more productive of peace than a life has been.