“Well, you are a good little thing,” Miss De Courcy would say, pulling on her yellow gloves and starting for the street when the dust began to fly.  She never seemed to be doing anything.  A few torn books lay about, but Druse never saw her open them.  She had warned Druse not to come in of an evening, for her brother might be home in a temper.  Druse thought she saw him once, such a handsome man with his hair lightly tinged with gray; he was turning down the hall as Druse came wearily up the stairs, and she saw him go in Miss De Courcy’s room; but then again when Gusty was sick, and she had to go down at night and beg the janitress to come up and see if it were the measles, there was a much younger man, with reddened eyes, from whose glance Druse shrank as she passed him, and he certainly reeled a little, and he also went in Miss De Courcy’s door, and from motives of delicacy she did not ask which was he,—­though she felt a deep curiosity to know.  Not that Miss De Courcy refrained from mentioning him.  On the contrary, she told heart-rending incidents of his cruelty, as she tilted back and forth lazily in her rocking-chair, while Druse sat by, spellbound, her thin hands clasped tightly over the work in her lap, neglecting even the bon-bons that Miss De Courcy lavished upon her.

One morning there was a cruel purple mark on the smooth dark skin of Miss De Courcy’s brow, and the round wrist was red and swollen.  Druse’s eyes flashed as she saw them.  “I expect I’m as wicked as a murderer,” she said, “for I wish that brother of yours was dead.  Yes, I do, ‘n’ I’d like to kill him!” And the self-contained and usually stoical little thing burst into passionate tears, and hid her face in Miss De Courcy’s lap.

A dark flush passed over that young lady’s face, and something glittered in the hard blue eyes.  She drew Druse tight against her heart, as though she would never let her go, and then she laughed nervously, trying to soothe her.  “There, there, it ain’t anything.  They’re all brutes, but I was ugly myself last night, ‘n’ made him mad.  Tell me something about the country, Druse, like you did the other day—­anything.  I don’t care.”

“Do you wish you was back there, too?” asked homesick Druse, wistfully.  Druse could no more take root in the city than could a partridge-berry plant, set in the flinty earth of the back-yard.

“Wish I was back?  Yes, if I could go back where I used to live,” said Miss De Courcy with her hoarse, abrupt little laugh.  “No, I don’t either.  Folks are pretty much all devils, city or country.”

Druse shivered a little.  She looked up with dumb pleading into the reckless, beautiful face she had learned to love so well from her humble tendings and ministerings.  She had the nature to love where she served.  She had no words to say, but Miss De Courcy turned away from the sorrowful, puzzled eyes of forget-me-not blue, the sole beauty of the homely, irregular little face.