I explained how from what Keller had told me Alida would have enough to live upon even if they never saw another sixpence of her father's money. Also I described what my father was doing to the Garden Cottage to fit it for their coming. "Oh, do let me come and help. Ask your father. I should love to! And I should have far more idea than a man. I could get mother to come too, sometimes, though you know how loath she is to move far out of her own house. Still, she could drive over." Never was there so short a walk as that between the pier above Mere Felix's and the gate of Chateau Schneider. Rhoda Polly was so eager that she would have gone right across the river there and then, and climbed the hill to Garden Cottage, if I had not insisted on delivering her to her mother, and generally giving an account of my stewardship. Before going in, however, I warned her that the secret of Alida the Princess must be kept. It was only for herself. To the rest of the family she must be Mademoiselle Keller, the daughter of Keller Bey and his wife Linn. The need to keep so great a matter secret seemed to damp the girl's enthusiasm for a moment, but almost instantly she caught me by the hand in her impulsive boyish way. "I promise," she said, "and you are quite right. It was splendid of you to tell me. I am so grateful for that." "Of course I told you, Rhoda Polly. Who else could I have told?" She meditated a little, finger on lip before speaking. "Do you know it is rather a pity not to tell mother," she said at last. "She does not interfere, but she moderates and eases off the hard places. She has a great deal of influence in a quiet way--more than any-one--and she would never tell a soul. I really think that it would do Alida more good than anything else to have mother on our side from the first. We are all trumpeters like father (except perhaps Hugh, who is not like any of our brood), but it is mother who tells the trumpets when to stop sounding." I assured Rhoda Polly that she could do as she thought best in the matter. Mrs. Deventer was all she said and more. She possessed, besides, a pleasant quality of motherhood that glinted kindly through her spectacles. Then, of course, Rhoda Polly knew best. All that I wanted to avoid was having the secret which had been entrusted to me being battered about in the daily brawls of the Deventer family--still less did I wish that it should get abroad to set talking the commonplace gossips of the town. "Ah, _mon ami_," said Rhoda Polly, "you need not fear my mother. She knows the secrets of every one of us, I think--except perhaps Hugh's, who is too young to have any--and yet when we girls come to confide some tremendous fact to each other, we are astonished to find that mother has known it all the time." CHAPTER XXII IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW