When Molly was bathing the boy Belle would come and take a comfortable chair near by, ready to spring for powder or pins, but otherwise studying her fingernails or watching the bath with genial interest.  Molly found herself actually lacking in the strength of mind to exact that Belle stand silently near on these occasions, and so listened to a great many of Belle’s confidences.  Belle at home; Belle in the high school; Belle trying a position in Robbins’s candy store and not liking it because she was not used to freshness—­all these Belles became familiar to Molly.  Grewsome sicknesses, famous local crimes, gossip, weddings—­Belle touched upon them all; and Molly was ashamed to find it all interesting, it spite of herself.  One day Belle told Molly of Joe Rogers, and Joe figured daily in the narratives thereafter—­Joe, who drove a carriage, a motor, or a hay wagon, as the occasion required, for his uncle who owned a livery stable, but whose ambition was to buy out old Scanlon, the local undertaker, and to marry Belle.

“Joe knows more about embalming than even Owens of Napa does,” confided Belle.  “He’s got every plat in the cemetery memorized—­and, his uncle having carriages and horses, it would work real well; but Scanlon wants three thousand for the business and goodwill.”

“I wish he had it and you this minute!” Molly would think.  But when she opened Timmy’s bureau drawers, to find little suits and coats and socks in snowy, exquisite order; when Timmy, trim, sweet, and freshly clad, appeared for breakfast every morning, his fat hand in Belle’s, and “Dea’ Booey”—­as he called her—­figuring prominently in his limited vocabulary, Molly weakened again.

“Is he mad this morning?” Belle would ask in a whisper before Jerry appeared.  “Say, listen!  You just let him think I broke the decanter!” she suggested one day in loyal protection of Molly.  “Why, I think the world and all of Mr. Tressady!” she assured Molly, when reproved for speaking of him in this way.  “Wasn’t it the luckiest thing in the world—­my coming up that day?” she would demand joyously over and over.  Her adoption of and by the family of Tressady was—­to her, at least—­complete.

In January Uncle George Tressady’s estate was finally distributed, and this meant great financial ease at Rising Water.  Belle, Molly said, was really getting worse and worse as she became more and more at home; and the time had come to get a nice trained nurse—­some one who could keep a professional eye on Timmy, be a companion to Molly, and who would be quiet and refined, and gentle in her speech.

“And not a hint to Belle, Jerry,” Molly warned him, “until we see how it is going to work.  She’ll see presently that we don’t need both.”

When Miss Marshall, cool, silent, drab of hair and eye, arrived at the ranch, Belle was instantly suspicious.

“What’s she here for?  Who’s sick?” demanded Belle, coming into Mrs. Tressady’s room and closing the door behind her, her eyes bright and hard.