“Then you are sure your brother does not despise me, Martha?”

“My lady!  How can you say such a thing!” exclaimed Martha, dropping the comb.

“Well, everybody else does—­everybody I know—­ and a great many I never saw and who never saw me.  And now about yourself—­and you must tell me frankly—­do you hate me, Martha?”

“Hate you, you poor Lamb”—­tears were now choking her—­“you, whom I held in my arms?—­ Oh, don’t talk that way to me—­I can’t stand it, my lady!  Ever since you were a child, I—­”

“Yes, Martha, that is one reason for my asking you.  You did love me as a child—­but do you love me as a woman?  A child is forgiven because it knows no better; a woman does know.  Tell me, straight from your heart; I want to know; it will not make any difference in the way I love you.  You have been everything to me, father, mother—­everything, Martha.  Tell me, do you forgive me?”

“I have nothing to forgive, my lady,” she answered, her voice clearing, her will asserting itself.  “You have always been my lady and you always will be.  Maybe you’d better not talk any more—­you are all tired out, and—­”

“Oh, yes, I will talk and you must Listen.  Don’t pick up my comb.  Never mind about my hair now.  I know very well that there is not a single human being at home who would not shut the door in my face.  Some of them do not understand, and never will, and I should never try to explain my life to them.  I have suffered for my mistakes and made myself an outcast, and nobody has any compassion for an outcast.  That is why I sit and wonder about Stephen, and why I have sat all day and wondered about you, and whether I ought to run away, for I could not stay here if you felt about me as I know those people feel at home.  I want you to love me, Martha.  Oh! yes, you prove it.  You do everything for me, but way down deep in your heart, how do you feel?  Do you love me as you always did?—­Love, Martha, not just pity, or feeling sorry like Stephen, or blaming me like the others?  Yes, yes, yes, I know it, but I have wanted you to tell me.  I am so in the dark.  There, there, don’t cry!  Just one thing more.  What did your brother mean when be said there were others who would lift me out of my misery?”

Again the old servant, brushing away her tears, hesitated to reply.  She had sent for Stephen to answer this very question, and her mistress had practically driven him from the room.  How, then, was she to meet it?

“He meant Mr. Felix, and if you had only listened, my lady, be would have—­”

“Yes, I knew he did—­although he did not dare say it,” she cried with sudden intensity, sinking deeper back in her pillow as if to protect herself even from Martha.  “I did not listen, for I never want to hear his name again.  He drove me to what I did.  He let me leave his house without so much as a word of regret, and not one line did he write me the whole time I was at my father’s.