father, didn't she?

' Melanie was talking in order to forget her pain,

talking about people whom she had never met but had heard about
from time to time when she had visited Aunt Cissy, her mother's
sister, who was the eldest of a family of nine. But they were a
scattered family, most of them having settled abroad, and Aunt Cissy
was the only one of her mother's family with whom Melanie had ever
been close. A widow, she was a very sprightly seventy-year-old and,
in her own words, 'game