After the first understanding, which made everything in me stop, everything got moving, and all my inward workings worked double quick.  Why my heart didn’t get right out on the floor and look up at me.  I don’t know.  I kept on talking and making up wild things just to keep the children quiet, but I had to hold myself down to the floor.  To help, I put Billy and Kitty Lee both in my lap.

What I wanted to do was to go to Mrs. Moon and say:  “I am twelve and a half, and I’ve got the right to know.  I want to hear about my uncle.  I don’t want to know him, he not caring to know me.”  But before I could really think Mrs. Grey spoke again.

“He has no idea his sister left a child.  He told me she married very young, and died a year afterward; and he had heard nothing from her husband since.  As soon as I go home I am going to tell him.  I certainly am.”

“You had better not,” said Mrs. Moon.  “It’s been thirteen years since he left Yorkburg, and, as he has never been back, he evidently doesn’t care to know anything about it.  I don’t think the ladies would like you to tell.  They are very proud of having kept so quiet out of respect to her father’s wishes.  If Parke Alden had wanted to learn anything, he could have done it years ago.”

“But I tell you he doesn’t know there’s anything to learn.”  And the Michigan lady’s voice was as snappy as the place she came from.  “I know Dr. Alden well,” she went on.  “He’s operated on me twice, and I’ve spent weeks in his hospital.  When he tells me it’s best for my head to come off—­off my head is to come.  And when a man can make people feel that way about him, he isn’t the kind that’s not square on four sides.

“I tell you, he doesn’t know about this child.  He’s often talked to me about Yorkburg, knowing you were my cousin.  He told me of his sister running away with an actor and marrying him, and dying a year later.  Also of his father’s death and the sale of the old home, and of many other things.  There’s no place on earth he loves as he does Virginia.  He doesn’t come back because there’s no one to come to see specially.  No real close kin, I mean.  The changes in the place where you were born make a man lonelier than a strange city does, and something seems to keep him away.”

“You say he doesn’t know his sister left a child?” Mrs. Moon put down the needle she was trying to thread, and stuck it in her work.  “Why doesn’t he know?”

“Why should he?  Who was there to tell him, if a bunch of women made up their minds he shouldn’t know?  He wrote to his sister again and again, but whether his letters ever reached her he never knew.  He thinks not, as it was unlike her not to write if they were received.

“Travelling from place to place with her actor husband, who, he said, was a ‘younger son Englishman,’ the letters probably miscarried, and not for months after her death did he know she was dead.”

“We didn’t, either,” interrupted Mrs. Moon.  “In fact, we heard it through Parke, who went West after his father’s death.  He wrote Roy Wright, telling him about it.”