“It did not occur to her that her irritation was due to the pleasanter emotion which preceded it, just as when we are satisfied with a sense of glowing warmth, an innocent drop of cold water may fall upon us with a sudden smart.”

Mr. Ronald, searching her face for some clue to the abrupt change in her voice and manner, saw her cheeks grow white, her lips and chin quiver painfully.

“You are not well?” he asked, after a second of troubled groping in the dark.

“O, perfectly.”  She recollected Martha’s injunction, “Never you let on to ’em, any of your worries.  The rich must not be annoyed,” and pulled herself together with a determined mental grip.

“It is good that, being so far away from home, you can be under the care of your old nurse,” observed Mr. Ronald thoughtfully.

“My old nurse,” Claire mechanically repeated, preoccupied with her own painful meditations.

“Martha.  It is good, it certainly must be comforting to those who care for you, to know you are being looked after by so old and trusted a family servant.”

Claire did not reply.  She was hardly conscious he was speaking.

“When Martha first mentioned you to me—­to Mrs. Sherman, rather—­she described you as her young lady.  She has a very warm feeling for you.  I think she considers you in the light of personal property, like a child of her own.  That’s excusable—­it’s commendable, even, in such a case as this.  I believe she said she nursed you till you were able to walk.”

With a shock of sudden realization, Claire waked to the fact that something was wrong somewhere—­something that it was up to her to make right at once.  And yet, it was all so cloudy, so confused in her mind with her duty to Martha, her duty to herself, and to these people—­her fear of being again kindly but firmly put back in her place if she ventured the merest fraction of an inch beyond the boundary prescribed by this grandee of the autocratic bearing and “keep-off-the-grass expression,” that she hesitated, and her opportunity was lost.

“I think I must go now,” she announced abruptly, and rose, got past him somehow, and made blindly for the door.  Then there was the dim vista of the long hall stretching before her, like a path of escape, and she fled its length, and down that of the staircase.  Then out at the street-door, and into the chill of the cold December noonday.

When she had vanished, Francis Ronald stood a moment with eyes fixed in the direction she had taken.  Then, abruptly, he seized the telephone that stood upon the table beside him, switched it to connect with the basement region, and called for Mrs. Slawson.

“This is Mr. Ronald speaking.  Is Martha there?”

“Yes, sir.  Please hold the wire, and I’ll call her.”

“Be quick!”

“Yes, sir!”

A second, and Martha’s voice repeated his name.  “Mr. Ronald, this is Martha!”