“Look at that,” I said, and laid it before him, “and she has asked us to supper for next Sunday!”

Well, we couldn’t make anything of it.  Why was a woman with a name like that down here with nothing to eat but the things that William Watters could forage for, and that Billy could supply from his little store, and that she paid for with Sheffield trays?

We had supper that Sunday night in the great dining-room.  There was a five-branched candlestick with tall white candles in the center of the shining mahogany table and William Watters acted as butler.  You never would have believed how well he did it.  And after supper we had coffee on the front porch and looked out over the hills at the sunset, and the silver moon and the old toad came out from under his stone and sat with us.

Lady Crusoe was in a thin white dress which she had made for herself, and she talked of the old place and of her childhood there.  But not a word did she say of why she had come back to live alone on the Davenant ancestral acres.

It was her mother, we learned, who was a Davenant, and it was her mother’s father who was the old admiral.  She said nothing of the man whose name was on her card.  It was as if she stopped short when she came to that part of her life, or as if it had never been.

She took me up-stairs after a while and left Billy to smoke on the porch.  She said that she had something that she wanted me to see.  Her room was a huge square one at the southwest corner of the house.  There was a massive four-poster bed with faded blue satin curtains, and there was a fireplace with fire-dogs and an Adam screen.  Lady Crusoe carried a candle, and as she stood in the center of the room she seemed to gather all of the light to her, like the saints in the old pictures.  She was so perfectly lovely that I almost wanted to cry.  I can’t explain it, but there was something pathetic about her beauty.

She set the candle down and opened an old brass-bound chest.  She took out a roll of cloth and brought it over and laid it on the table beside the candle.

“I bought it with some of the money that your Billy got for my Sheffield tray,” she said.  Then she turned to me with a quick motion and laid her hands on my shoulders.  “Oh, you very dear—­when I saw you making those little things—­I knew that—­that the good Lord had led me.  Will you—­will you—­show me—­how?”

I told Billy about it on the way home.

“She doesn’t know anything about sewing, and she hasn’t any patterns, and I am to go up every day, and William Watters will come for me with his mule—­”

Then I cried about her a little, because it seemed so dreadful that she should be there all alone, without any one to sustain her and cherish her as Billy did me.

“Oh, Billy, Billy,” I said to him, “I’d rather live over a grocery store with you than live in a palace with anybody else—­”

And Billy said, “Don’t cry, lady love, you are not going to live with anybody else.”