Theexcitement of the “Prom” over, Shirley Harcourt and her friends turned their attention to the usual preparation for examinations and the Commencement exercises not far away. Like most schools of the sort, Westlake would have graceful outdoor pageants. Both Shirley and Sidney were in the senior play, which was a good thing for them. There was little time for anything but lessons, practising and constant association with their friends.
At last Shirley heard from her mother, relative to her question. She did not know how anxious she had been until she felt the relief that came with the reading.
“Yes, dear,” wrote Mrs. Harcourt, “you are certainly my own little girl ‘by borning.’ I am sorry that you have had this long wait for a reply, but I hope that this thought was only a fancy and not a worry. No, I have not received the first letter you mention. I am very much interested in this other girl, so like you. Tell me more about her. Whenand where was she born and on what date? Your father wants to know, too. O Shirley, you have no idea what this trip means to him. In spite of his hard work, he looks ten years younger, feels like a boy, he says, and knows that this will mean everything professionally.”
Shirley was almost sorry to tell Sidney that she had received word, but Sidney herself asked her if she had received it. “I saw Madge going up with a foreign looking letter in her hand. I wondered if you could have received word from your mother, Shirley,” said Sidney, meeting Shirley after dinner.
“Yes, Sidney, and I want you to read it. Let’s go up right now. Nobody is there.”
The two girls ran up the stairs together. Sidney sat down in the chair Shirley offered, afraid to ask Shirley what her mother had said. She looked searchingly at Shirley, however, saying, “I think that it is good news, from the way you look.”
“Yes, Sidney,—but read the whole letter, please. It is especially interesting. I’m crazy to see the things that they are bringing home. At Christmas, you know, they were in the wilds and couldn’t even send me a present. She’s bringing me an Egyptian scarab and all sorts of things from crazy places, besides some of the regular treasures that she will pick up this summer in Europe. They haven’t somuch money, though, because the trip has taken so much. My father will make something, though, by writing everything up.”
Sidney was holding the letter and listening to Shirley. “And you think that all that sort of thing is better, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Shirley simply replied.
“I begin to understand about you, Shirley.”
That was all Sidney said until after she read the letter, looking up to smile at Shirley, however, when she came to the important statement. Then she read on again, soberly, to the end, and handed the letter back to Shirley. “That is a fine letter. How beautifully she writes of what they have seen. I could wish that my real mother, if she is anywhere, could be as interesting as that. I’m so afraid, Shirley that—oh, well, I’ve no business to harrow you all up with my woes!”
“You must remember that a very beautiful lady selected you and made you her own,” Shirley suggested.
“Yes, and I have so much that they have given me. I guess that I am a pretty ‘small potato,’ Shirley!”
But the suggestion of being “selected” jarred upon Sidney’s sensitiveness. Where had her parents found her? There was one possibility that she hadnot considered, and that brightened her when she thought of it. It might be that she was related after all, a child of some relative.
Sidney had now come to the point where she felt that she must know. That night she wrote to her father, telling him of her visit to the deposit box and its results. She addressed the letter to his office, but she said that if it was his judgment to show her mother the letter, she was ready for her to know. “It was a great shock,” she wrote, “but I am trying to be sensible about it. I dread and yet I want to know the rest.”
She sent the letter by special delivery the next morning. That night she received a telegram from her father to the effect that he was driving up to see her on the following day. Sidney’s heart was comforted by the prompt response, though she could scarcely suppress her excitement. She did not tell Shirley, could not, for some reason. The girls in her suite knew of her telegram, but it was nothing new for Mr. Thorne to telegraph his movements.
It was just after lunch when Sidney saw her father’s car coming around the drive. She had been staying near the main building except during recitation hours and now, with several of the girls, she was out upon the campus near by. She ran toward the drive, waving, and stood till the carreached her. Her father was alone, driving the car himself. How fine he was, and how kind!
Mr. Thorne reached out from the car and took Sidney’s outstretched hand, patting it and looking searchingly into the earnest brown eyes that were raised to his. “So that was what was the matter, childie,” he said. “Run in and ask permission to be carried off. We’ll get away from the school to talk. I will drive up to let any investigating authorities know that it is your father who wants you.”
“Good. Shall I change to a dress?”
“Yes. Take off your uniform and bring a coat and hat. We shall have dinner somewhere, probably, and then I will bring you back. Will you miss any recitations?”
“One, but I can fix that.”
It was on the lake shore, below a sandy bluff, with their car parked above, that Mr. Thorne and his daughter sat down to have their talk. The fresh air was exhilarating. There was movement in the waves and in the flight of birds, around them and out above the waters; but there was not a soul on the beach to overhear or distract.
Before this they had talked about unimportant things, and Mr. Thorne had said that he had not yet mentioned the matter to her mother. Now he began by reminding her, as Shirley had, that all this hadbeen known to them and that their love for her had only grown with the years. “You belong to us, Sidney. You are our own child by adoption and in every way you have grown into our hearts. Your mother was wondering only the other day how she would bear to have you grow up, come out into society and leave her, very likely, to marry some one,—as she did herself. ‘It’s a little too near,’ she said. Now can you realize that this is all true?”
“I think so,” soberly Sidney replied. “Seeing you and hearing you say these things makes me feel as I always have,—that I belong!”
“Indeed you do, my child. I’d like to see any one take you away from us! But I know that you are anxious to hear how it all happened. Let me see. You were seventeen in September, weren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then eighteen years ago or so your mother had something of a collapse after undertaking too many things socially. In the middle of the winter I took her to California, and when it grew warm, we went immediately to the cottage in Wisconsin for the summer. We did not even stop in Chicago and your mother only longed for the woods and the little lake. We lived quietly, though I had to go back and forth. There were the usual servants, though your mother did not want many around. No one livedin the cottage except one quite intelligent girl who was a nurse, on her vacation, and just the one to stay with your mother.
“They were outdoors as much as possible and your mother began to get her tone again, even telling me that she must go back to Chicago, to avoid the necessity of my frequent trips. But I persuaded her to stay through October at least, or a part of it, if I remember correctly.
“Once this young woman who was with your mother stopped with her at her home and there your mother found you, about two months old by that time, they said, and unusually pretty. They tell me though that a kiddie does not look like anything till it is about three months old. It was a new interest, and when your mother found that your mother and father were dead and that these good people had taken you for their daughter’s friend, your aunt, also a nurse, she began to wonder if she might not have the baby herself. You were like a new doll to her, Sidney, and she was temporarily disgusted with so much society.
“She began to visit the country home, to take pictures of the baby, to get pretty clothes for it,—you can imagine how your mother would.”
“Yes,” laughed Sidney, and the two who lovedMrs. Thorne so dearly exchanged understanding glances.
“We learned that your parents were people above reproach and as your mother found that their name, Sampson, was one in the Standish lineage, she let your aunt go on about the Standishes to her heart’s content. But I think that your mother has almost forgotten about your having no real connection with our immediate ancestry.”
“I suppose so,” mechanically answered Sidney, stunned at the new name.
Mr. Thorne had seen her wince, but he nerved himself to go on. It had to be told. How much better it would have been for Sidney to have known the truth. Yet, there had been some point, too, in Sidney’s growing up to this lovely young womanhood as a child of the house. What would have been the psychology of it Mr. Thorne could not decide, though he had thought of little else since he had read Sidney’s pitiful letter.
“But now, Sidney, I am realizing that we have known very little of everything perhaps interesting to you in this connection. There are several things that I recall about the arrangement that I must look into for your sake. There was no birth certificate, for one thing. Everything was fixed up as tight for us as could be, and all that we cared for was thatyour parents should have been good people. The chief attraction was your small self.
“But now I am going to do a little detective work on my own account and I shall say nothing to your mother at present. I have a fancy that it may or may not amount to anything, and I must say, Sidney, that I was astonished at the duplication of yourself, almost, in Shirley Harcourt. Is she sure that she is the child of Dr. and Mrs. Harcourt?”
“I have just read a letter from Mrs. Harcourt in answer to that very question. She is, and she was born in Chicago. But we haven’t the same birthdays.”
“I am not sure that we know your birthday, Sidney. You seemed to your mother’s aunt a little older than you were according to accounts, though we told her nothing. She thinks you ours.”
“If you look things up and find anything dreadful the matter, Daddy, don’t tell me!”
“There will be nothing dreadful. Sidney, there has always been a quality about you that can be only accounted for by something innate. It is not all our training and the environment of refinement. There was something in you, my child. You were always dainty and beauty-loving and responsive,——”
“Can’t account for it in that way, Daddy,” interposedSidney, as Mr. Thorne paused. “Think how different children in the same family are. I admired Mother and Auntie so much and was so proud of our family, that I just grew up with the idea of being like Mother.”
“That would support your mother’s idea that it was better for you not to know. Well, we’ll not discuss that now. I have already written to the people in Wisconsin and in a few days, after some pressing business matters are disposed of, I may go there myself. I know how I should feel in your place, Sidney. I regret beyond words that you have had the suffering which you have had. We could not imagine why you were suddenly so upset and ill. But I am glad to see that you have gotten beyond that.”
“It is partly due to Shirley, Father. She brought me some fruit when I was so miserable and we became really acquainted. It is queer the way we feel about each other. I know that Shirley feels as I do. It was uncanny, I thought at first, and I did not like it at all. Really, I have had a big lesson, I suppose, but my, what a hard one it has been! I hadn’t the least idea that I was so proud. But you would have laughed at what Shirley said to me about that. Shirley has a big soul and doesn’t seem to hold anything against me no matter how silly I’ve been. She saidthat my ‘superiority complex’ mustn’t go into ‘total eclipse!’”
“You have talked to her, then, about this?”
“Yes. I have seen the pictures of her parents, too. Her father makes me think of you. Once I would have said that they had ‘quite intelligent faces,’ I suppose!”
“Life has a great way of taking down our ‘superiority complexes,’ Sidney, but it is just as well to keep our self-respect.”
“That is what Shirley said. She lives almost in the university there, I suppose, and hears faculty conversation,—perhaps as elevating as ours, Daddy!”
Sidney laughed as she spoke, and her father agreed that there were opportunities for culture in other circles except their own. More nonsense of comparisons followed, while Sidney wrote in the sand with a stick and Mr. Thorne tossed an occasional pebble. Then he rose and held a hand to Sidney. “Come, now,” he said. “I told your mother that I was not going to be home until late. I want to take you far enough away to get all the cobwebs and kinks out of your brain and then we shall stop somewhere for the best dinner that we can find. Please try to have a few care-free hours with an old daddy that is very fond of his child.”
“I can do it,” gratefully cried Sidney, “but you mixed your figures terribly when you talked about cobwebs and kinks!”