“Pa,” she said, sweetly, “am I really your child and ma’s?”
Mr. Kipley recoiled sharply.
“Well, of all things!” he ejaculated.
Miss Hematite Kipley experienced a pang of disappointment.
She had just been reading a “perfectly lovely romance,” where an adopted child turned out to be the daughter of a duke. While she did not insist on a dukedom, she had had an ecstatic feeling that she might be a millionairess.
“You never brought me home in your arms and told ma that a beautiful young gypsy girl——” she began, falteringly.
“No,” said Mr. Kipley, with precision; “I never did, and that’s the reason I’m alive to-day. If I’d come home with a baby, talking about beautiful young gypsies, there’d have been a funeral, and no mourners. An ’t would have served me right, too.”
Then he softened parentally toward this young woman of his own flesh and blood.
“It don’t seem so very long ago, Hemmy, since you was born. Born in the regular, genu-wine way. Why, we named you Hematite because they struck the big find of ore in the mine that same morning. It was my idea, too, for your aunt, who lived in the copper country, had just named her little girl Amygdoloid—Amy, for short—and she was plum offensive about having the most elegant name out. ‘What’s the matter with Hematite?’ says I!”
Miss Hematite kissed her undoubted parent forgivingly, and rose from the ashes of her air castle like an undiscouraged young phœnix.