“Don’t go back.  Just stay here with us.”

“Oh, Mrs. Wiley’ll hunt me up,” said Mary.  “It’s likely she’s on my trail before this.  I might stay here till she finds me, I s’pose, if your folks don’t mind.  I was a darn fool ever to think of skipping out.  She’d run a weasel to earth.  But I was so misrebul.”

Mary’s voice quivered, but she was ashamed of showing her weakness.

“I hain’t had the life of a dog for these four years,” she explained defiantly.

“You’ve been four years with Mrs. Wiley?”

“Yip.  She took me out of the asylum over in Hopetown when I was eight.”

“That’s the same place Mrs. Blythe came from,” exclaimed Faith.

“I was two years in the asylum.  I was put there when I was six.  My ma had hung herself and my pa had cut his throat.”

“Holy cats!  Why?” said Jerry.

“Booze,” said Mary laconically.

“And you’ve no relations?”

“Not a darn one that I know of.  Must have had some once, though.  I was called after half a dozen of them.  My full name is Mary Martha Lucilla Moore Ball Vance.  Can you beat that?  My grandfather was a rich man.  I’ll bet he was richer than your grandfather.  But pa drunk it all up and ma, she did her part.  They used to beat me, too.  Laws, I’ve been licked so much I kind of like it.”

Mary tossed her head.  She divined that the manse children were pitying her for her many stripes and she did not want pity.  She wanted to be envied.  She looked gaily about her.  Her strange eyes, now that the dullness of famine was removed from them, were brilliant.  She would show these youngsters what a personage she was.

“I’ve been sick an awful lot,” she said proudly.  “There’s not many kids could have come through what I have.  I’ve had scarlet fever and measles and ersipelas and mumps and whooping cough and pewmonia.”

“Were you ever fatally sick?” asked Una.

“I don’t know,” said Mary doubtfully.

“Of course she wasn’t,” scoffed Jerry.  “If you’re fatally sick you die.”

“Oh, well, I never died exactly,” said Mary, “but I come blamed near it once.  They thought I was dead and they were getting ready to lay me out when I up and come to.”

“What is it like to be half dead?” asked Jerry curiously.

“Like nothing.  I didn’t know it for days afterwards.  It was when I had the pewmonia.  Mrs. Wiley wouldn’t have the doctor—­said she wasn’t going to no such expense for a home girl.  Old Aunt Christina MacAllister nursed me with poultices.  She brung me round.  But sometimes I wish I’d just died the other half and done with it.  I’d been better off.”

“If you went to heaven I s’pose you would,” said Faith, rather doubtfully.

“Well, what other place is there to go to?” demanded Mary in a puzzled voice.

“There’s hell, you know,” said Una, dropping her voice and hugging Mary to lessen the awfulness of the suggestion.