Clementina looked at Mrs. Lander, who said, “Go, of cou’se, child.  I wish I could go, too.”

“Do come, too,” Miss Milray entreated.

“No, no,” said Mrs. Lander, flattered.  “I a’n’t feeling very well, to-day.  I guess I’m better off at home.  But don’t you hurry back on my account, Clementina.”  While the girl was gone to put on her hat she talked on about her.  “She’s the best gul in the wo’ld, and she won’t be one of the poorest; and I shall feel that I’m doin’ just what Mr. Landa would have wanted I should.  He picked her out himself, moa than three yea’s ago, when we was drivin’ past her house at Middlemount, and it was to humor him afta he was gone, moa than anything else, that I took her.  Well, she wa’n’t so very easy to git, either, I can tell you.”  She cut short her history of the affair to say when Clementina came back, “I want you should do the odderin’ yourself, Miss Milray, and not let her scrimp with the money.  She wants to git some visitin’ cahds; and if you miss anything about her that she’d ought to have, or that any otha yong lady’s got, won’t you just git it for her?”

As soon as she imagined the case, Miss Milray set herself to overcome Mrs. Lander’s reluctance from a maid.  She prevailed with her to try the Italian woman whom she sent her, and in a day the genial Maddalena had effaced the whole tradition of the bleak Ellida.  It was not essential to the understanding which instantly established itself between them that they should have any language in common.  They babbled at each other, Mrs. Lander in her Bostonized Yankee, and Maddalena in her gutteral Florentine, and Mrs. Lander was flattered to find how well she knew Italian.

Miss Milray had begun being nice to Clementina in fealty to her brother, who so seldom made any proof of her devotion to him, and to whom she bad remained passionately true through his shady past.  She was eager to humor his whim for the little country girl who had taken his fancy, because it was his whim, and not because she had any hopes that Clementina would justify it.  She had made Dr. Welwright tell her all he knew about her, and his report of her grace and beauty had piqued her curiosity; his account of the forlorn dullness of her life with Mrs. Lander in their hotel had touched her heart.  But she was still skeptical when she went to get her letter of introduction; when she brought Clementina home from the dressmaker’s she asked if she might kiss her, and said she was already in love with her.

Her love might have made her wish to do everything for her that she now began to do, but it simplified the situation to account for her to the world as the ward of Mrs. Lander, who was as rich as she was vulgar, and it was with Clementina in this character that Miss Milray began to make the round of afternoon teas, and inspired invitations for her at pleasant houses, by giving a young ladies’ lunch for her at her own.  Before the night of her little dance, she