Lucy regarded her aunt mischievously.
“Probably if I’d been all Webster I 59 shouldn’t have,” she remarked demurely. “But half of me, you see, is Duquesne, and the Duquesnes were generous providers.”
If Ellen sensed this jocose rebuke, she at least neither resented it nor paid the slightest heed to its innuendo.
“The Duquesnes?” she questioned.
“My mother was a Duquesne.”
“Oh, she was?”
“Didn’t you know that?”
“Yes, I reckon I did at the time your father married, but I’d forgot about it. Thomas an’ I didn’t write much to one another, an’ latterly I didn’t hear from him at all.”
“It was a pity.”
“I dunno as it made much difference,” Ellen said. “Likely he didn’t remember much about his home an’ his relations.”