“O, go ‘way! You ain’t never had a leanin’ in any gen’l’man’s direction, I’d be willin’ to wager.  An’ yet, I may as well tell you, you been gettin’ kinder white an’ scrawny yourself lately, beggin’ your pardon for bein’ so bold as notice it.  Mind, I ain’t the faintest notion of holdin’ it against you!  I know better than think you been settin’ your affections on anybody.  There’s other things besides love gives you that tired feelin’.  What you need is somethin’ to brace you up, an’ clear your blood, like Hoodses Sassperilla.  Everybody feels the way you do, this time o’ year.  I heard a young saleslady (she wasn’t a woman, mind you, she was a sales_lady_), I heard a young saleslady in the car the other mornin’ complain—­she was the reel dressy kind, you know, with more’n a month’s pay of hair, boilin’ over on the back of her head in puffs an’ things—­the gallus sort that, if you want to buy a yard o’ good flannen off her, will sass you up an’ down to your face, as fresh as if she was your own daughter—­she was complainin’ ’the Spring always made her feel so sorter, kinder, so awful la-anguid.’”

“Martha, dear,” broke in Claire irrelevantly, “I wonder if you’d mind very much if I told Mr. Ronald the truth.  He thinks you were an old family servant.  He thinks you nursed me till I was able to walk.”

Martha considered.  “Well, ain’t that the truth?” she asked blandly.  “I lived out from the time I was twelve years old.  That was in Mrs. Granville’s mother’s house.  When I was sixteen I went to Mrs. Granville’s.  I was kitchen-maid there first-off, an’ gradjelly she promoted me till I was first housemaid.  I never left her till I got married.  If that don’t make me an old family servant, I’d like to know.”

“But he thinks you were an old family servant in our house.”

“Well, bless your heart, that’s his business, not mine.  How can I help what he thinks?”

“Didn’t you tell him, Martha dear, that you nursed me till I was able to walk?”

“Shoor I did!  An’ it’s the livin’ truth.  What’s the matter with that?  Believe me, you wasn’t good for more than a minit or two more on your legs, when I got you into your bed that blessed night.  You was clean bowled over, an’ you couldn’t ‘a’ walked another step if you’d been killed for it.  Didn’t I nurse you them days you was in bed, helplesslike as a baby?  Didn’t I nurse you till you could walk?”

“Indeed you did.  And that’s precisely the point!” said Claire.  “If Mr. Ronald—­if Mrs. Sherman knew the truth, that I was poor, homeless, without a friend in New York the night you picked me up on the street, and carried me home and cared for me without knowing a thing about me, they mightn’t—­they wouldn’t have taken me into their house and given me their little boy to train.  And because they wouldn’t, I want to tell them.  I want to square myself.  I ought to have told them long ago.  I want—­”