“Yes; she was pretty, I think,” she answers slowly; “but, if she had lived, she might have been no better-looking than I am now.”
“And that would be nice enough for me; but, nurse, stoop down. I want to tell you something. She isn’t dead, or wasn’t when my father married my stepmother. They think that I think so, but a boy told me that she went away, and was divorced. I didn’t believe it at first, but I found out that it was true, and I would so much like to find her.”
“Why?”
“Because I believe it was father’s own fault that she went away. It may be wrong in me to say it, but I know he could be hateful sometimes, and I think he never liked me so well as he liked my sisters; and I always thought my stepmother was kinder to me than he was.”
“God bless her for that!”
Thorndyke looks at the nurse, surprised at the earnestness of the words.
“Why, yes,” he says, encouraged in his confidences by her sympathy. “She was always good to me, but I guess my own mother was superior to her, and father knew it; but they got along very well together, and she was good to him when he was sick at last.”
“Did he prosper?”
“Yes, quite well; but what he left wasn’t much, divided among four of us, and mother’s share out. I’ll have a little to start me with, though, and I got good schooling.”
“I am glad of that,” says the nurse.