But Axie did not answer. Her quick eye had gone rapidly on, and with an ejaculation of surprise, she read what Queenie had written, while her mistress turned white as ashes, and could only whisper her incredulity. “_Rennet_ not mine! not Margery’s child! No, no, I cannot believe that,” she said, and a sense of pain began to rise in her heart at the thought of losing in this way the little dark-eyed girl who had crept into her love in spite of her wilful, imperious ways. “Read it again, Axie,” she continued; “You did not get it right before. Rennet never said no such thing, unless she’s crazy. Yes, that’s it,” and grandma’s face brightened, and her voice was more cheery. “Fretting for Phil has driven her out of her mind. She hain’t slep’, nor cried, nor et sence he died. I shall go over there at once, and do you run as fast as you can to the livery after a hoss and sleigh.” And so within an hour after Pierre delivered Queenie’s letter to Grandma Ferguson she was alighting at the door of Hetherton Place. Margery, who knew nothing of Pierre’s journey to the village, opened the door to the old lady, whose first exclamation was: “How is she, and when did the spell come on her?” “Do you mean Reinette, and how did you know anything ailed her?” Margery asked, and grandma replied: “How do I know? Didn’t that Frenchman fetch me a letter from her this mornin’, in which she said she wasn’t my granddarter, and that——” Here grandma stopped, struck by the likeness to her daughter which had so impressed her the first time she saw Margery. She had paid no attention to the assertion in Reinette’s letter that Margery was her granddaughter, but now, as she looked into the blue eyes confronting her so steadily, she saw there something which awoke within her a strange feeling of kinship and love, and she continued with a faltering voice: “She said that you was Margaret’s girl. Be you Margery? Be you my granddarter?” “I don’t know, the story seems so incredible,” Margery replied, but she took the hands extended toward her in her own, and covered them with kisses, as she continued: “If I am Margery Hetherton, it is very hard on Queenie, and you must love her just the same—love her better if possible.” “Yes, yes,” grandma replied. “Nothing shall change my love for her. Where is she? Let me go to her at once.” Queenie, who was lying on the lounge, must have been almost asleep, for she heard nothing until a hand was laid gently upon her head, and a voice full of love and pity said to her: “_Rennet! poor little Rennet!_”