“I did it.  I made it up and fixed everything, and you all just agreed,” I said.  “And if anybody has to pay, I’m the one to do it.”  And I paid all right.  Paid to the full.  But it’s over now, and I’m not going to think about it any more.  When a thing is over, that should be the end of it, Miss Katherine says, and with me what she says goes.

Miss Bray is away.  If some of her relations liked her well enough to have her stay a few months with them, she could get leave of absence; but she’s never been known to stay but four weeks.  She’s gone to visit her sister somewhere in Fauquier County.  Her sister’s husband always leaves home for his health when she arrives, and Miss Bray says she thinks it’s so queer he has the same kind of spells at the same time every year.

But now Miss Katherine’s back, nothing matters.  Nothing!

Yesterday I was just a squirrel in a cage.  All day long I was saying:  “Well, Squirrel, turn your little wheel.  That’s all you can do; turn your little wheel.”  And inside I was turning as hard and fast as a sure-enough squirrel turns; but outside I was just mechanical.

I wonder sometimes I don’t blaze up right before people’s eyes.  I’m so often on fire—­that is, my mind and heart are—­that I think at times my body will surely catch.  Thus far it hasn’t, but if I don’t go somewhere, see something, do something different, it’s apt to, and the doctors won’t have a name for the new kind of inflammation.

I’m going to die after a while, and I’m so afraid I will do it before I travel some that if I were a boy child I’d go anyhow.  But I can’t go.  That is, not yet.

Miss Katherine has been travelling for two months up North.  She’s been with her brother and his wife.  The wife is sick, or she thinks she is, which Miss Katherine says is a hard disease to cure, and she’s kept them moving from place to place.

They wanted Miss Katherine to go to Europe with them this fall, but she isn’t going.  She’s been twice, and says she don’t want to go.  But I don’t believe it’s that.  I believe it’s something else.

But sufficient unto the day is the happiness thereof!  I’m going to enjoy her staying, and already everything seems different.

You see, Miss Katherine lives here just for love, and when you do things for love you do them differently from the way you do them for money.

We are just Charity children, some not knowing who they are, I being one of that kind; but she never treats us as if she thinks of that.  If we were relations she liked, she couldn’t be kinder or nicer, and when a child is in trouble Miss Katherine is the one that’s gone to at once.

She is never too tired or too busy to listen, but she’s awful firm; and there’s no nonsense or sullenness or shamming where she is.  She can see through the insides of your soul, up to the top and down to the tip, and in front of her eyes you are just your plain self.  Only that, and nothing more.  They are gray, her eyes are, with a dark rim around the gray part; and she has the longest black lashes I ever saw.  Her hair is black, too, like an Eastern Princess and in the morning when she puts her cap on and her nurse’s white dress, which she wears when on duty, I call her to myself, “My Lady of the Lovely Heart,” and I could kneel down and say my prayers to her.