“You lost your parents, I know, and were you an only child?” Miss Frothingham ventured, after a respectful silence. But immediately the scarlet, apologetic color flooded her face, and she added hastily: “I beg your pardon! Of course I knew that you have a brother—I know Mr. Rutledge and his wife!”
“Yes, I have a brother,” the doctor answered, rousing, and beginning briskly to assort and segregate again. The tone chilled her companion, and there was a pause.
“Your brother is Tommy’s and Rawley’s and the baby’s father,” Merle broke it by announcing flatly.
Her mother looked at her with an indulgent half-smile. She usually regarded Merle much as an amused stranger might have done; the odd little black-eyed, black-maned child who was always curling herself into corners about the house. Merle was going to be pretty, her mother thought to-night, in satisfaction. Her little face was blazing, her eyes shone, and she had pulled over her dishevelled curls a fantastic tissue-paper cap of autumn leaves left from some long-ago Hallowe’en frolic her mother could only half-remember.
“What do you know about them?” she asked good-naturedly. “You never saw them!”
“You told me once about them, when I was a teeny little girl,” Merle reminded her. “When we were in the cemetery you did. And Miss Frothingham told me.”
“So there’s a third child?” Doctor Madison asked, musing. Miss Frothingham nodded.
“A gorgeous boy. The handsomest baby I ever saw!... John,” she said.
“John was my father’s name. Sad, isn’t it?” Doctor Madison asked after a silence during which she had folded the brocade and added it to the heap.
“A costumier would buy lots of this just as it stands,” Miss Frothingham murmured by way of answer.