Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/153

 "Yes," replied Hattie Tolliver, without glancing from her work. "The child of a friend. I thought she might have passed him by to come home to her mother. . . . Funny how children can forget you."

Julia Shane stirred softly in the deep bed. "I thought you might be thinking that," she said. "I thought it would be better to tell you the truth. I wanted you to know anyway. The truth is, Hattie, that the child is her own. She is more interested in him than in me, and that's natural enough and quite proper."

The strong fingers paused abruptly in their work and lay motionless against the white linen. Hattie Tolliver's face betrayed her amazement; yet clearly she was a little amused.

"Charles always said there was something mysterious about Lily," she said. "But I never guessed she'd been secretly married."

The old woman, hesitating, coughed before she replied, as though the supremely respectable innocence of her niece somehow made her inarticulate. At last she summoned strength.

"But she's never been married, Hattie. There never was any ceremony."

"Then how . . ." In Mrs. Tolliver's face the amazement spread until her countenance was one great interrogation.

"Children," interrupted her aunt in a voice filled with tremulous calm, "can be born without marriage certificates. They have nothing to do with legal processes."

For a long time the niece kept silent, fingering the while the half finished pillow case. It appeared that she found some new and marvelous quality in it. She fingered the stuff as though she were in the act of purchasing it across a counter. At last she raised her head.

"Then it was true . . . that old story?" she asked.

"What story?"

"The one they told in the Town . . . about Lily's having to go away to Paris."

"Yes. . . . But no one ever really knew. They only guessed. They knew nothing at all. And they know nothing more to-day." The old woman paused for a second as though to give her words emphasis. "I'm trusting you never to tell,