Elliott felt rather ashamed to continue her probing. "Have they always lived with you," she asked, "the Fearings?"
"Oh, yes, ever since I can remember. Isn't Bruce splendid? I don't know how we could have got on at all this summer without Bruce."
Then Elliott gave up. If a mystery existed, either Laura didn't know of it, or she had forgotten it, or else she considered it too negligible to mention.
The girl found that for some reason she did not care to ask Stannard the source of his information. Would Bruce himself prove communicative? There could be no harm in finding out. Besides, it would tease Stannard to see her talking with "that fellow," and Elliott rather enjoyed teasing Stannard. And didn't she owe him something for a dictatorial interruption?
The thing would require manoeuvering. You couldn't talk to Bruce Fearing, or to any one else up here, whenever you felt like it; he was far too busy. But on the hill at sunset Elliott found her chance.
"I think Aunt Jessica," she remarked, "is the most wonderful woman I've ever seen."
A glow lit up Bruce's quiet gray eyes. "Mother Jess," he said, "is a miracle."
"She is so terrifically busy, and yet she never seems to hurry; and she always has time to talk to you and she never acts tired."
"I suppose she must be, sometimes. I like that name for her, 'Mother Jess.' Your--aunt, is she?"
"Oh, no," said Bruce, simply. "I've no Cameron or Fordyce blood in me, or any other pedigreed variety. My corpuscles are unregistered. She and Father Bob took Pete and me in when I was a baby and Pete was a mere toddler. I was born in the hotel down in the town there,--Am I boring you?"
"No, indeed!" Elliott had the grace to blush at the ease with which she was carrying on her investigation.
He wondered why she flushed, but went on quietly. "Our own mother died there in the hotel when I was a week old and we didn't seem to have any kin. At least, they never showed up. Mother was evidently a widow; Mother Jess got that from her belongings. She stopped overnight at Highboro, and I was born there. She hadn't told any one in the hotel where she was going. Registered from Boston, but nobody could be found in Boston who knew of her. The authorities were going to send Pete and me to some kind of a capitalized Home, when Mother Jess stepped in. She hadn't enough boys, so she said. Bob and Laura and Sid were on deck. Henry and Tom came along later. Fordyce was the one that died; he'd just slipped out. Mother Jess was feeling lonely, I guess. Anyway, she took us two; said she thought we'd be better off on the farm than in a Home and she needed us--bless her! Do you wonder Pete and I swear by the Camerons?"