She paused a second on this.

“If I were only sure of your sympathy!” A note of pleading fluttered in her voice.

“No thought of yours, however I regard it, but is sure of my sympathy—­because it’s yours,” he answered.

As though she had not heard, she went on.

“I was an orphan.  I never knew my father and mother.  The first things I remember are of the country—­perhaps that is why I love the out-of-doors—­the sky through my window, filled with huge, puffy, ice-cream clouds, a little new-born pig that somebody put in my bed one morning—­daisy-fields like snow—­and the darling peep-peep-peep of little bunches of yellow down that I was always trying to catch and never succeeding.  I couldn’t say chicken.  I always said shicken” She paused.  With that tenderness which every woman entertains for her own little girlhood, she smiled.

“I’ve told you of the five white birches.  I was looking at them and naming them on my fingers the day that Aunt Paula came.  My childhood ended there.  I seemed to grow up all at once.”

Blake muttered something inarticulate.  But at her look of inquiry, he merely said.  “Go on!”

“She isn’t really my aunt by blood,—­Aunt Paula isn’t.  You understand—­my father and her husband were brothers.  They all died—­everybody died but just Aunt Paula and me.  So she took me away with her.  And after that it was always the dreadful noise and confusion of New York, with only my one doll—­black Dinah—­a rag-baby.  I thought,” she interrupted herself wistfully, “I’d send Dinah to you when I got back to New York.  Would you like her?”

“Like her—­like her!  My—­my—­” But he swallowed his words.  “Go on!” He commanded again.

“Afterwards came London and then India.  Such education as I had, I got from governesses.  I didn’t have very much as girls go in my—­in my class.  I didn’t understand that then, any more than I understand why I wasn’t allowed to go to school or to play with other girls.  There was a time when I rebelled frightfully at that.  I can tell definitely just when it began.  We were passing a convent in the Bronx, and it was recess time.  The sisters in their starched caps were sewing over by the fence, and the girls were playing—­a ring game, ’Go in and out the window’—­I can hear it now.  I crowded my little face against the pickets to watch, and two little girls who weren’t in the game passed close to me.  The nearest one—­I ’m sure I’d know her now if I saw her grown up.  She was of about my own age, very dark, with the silkiest black hair and the longest black eyelashes that I ever saw.  She had a dimple at one corner of her mouth.  She wore on her arm a little bracelet with a gold heart dangling from it.  I wasn’t allowed any jewelry; and it came into my mind that I’d like a gold bracelet like that, before it came that I’d like such a friend for my very ownest and dearest.  The other girl, a red-haired minx who walked with her arm about my girl’s waist—­how jealous I was of her!  I watched until Aunt Paula dragged me away.  As I went, I shouted over my shoulder, ’Hello, little girl!’ The little dark girl saw me, and shouted back, ‘Hello!’ Dear little thing.  I hope she’s grown up safe and very happy!  She’ll never know what she meant to me!”