saw how nice I could make
it,--and I never had a home before,--I knew, if you ever came back, that
would end it all, and I did so hope you wouldn't!"

"It seemed a pity not to make hay while the sun shone?" I suggested.

She nodded, a little doubtfully. "I didn't think of it just that way,"
she said. "But--yes, I suppose any one would put it so. Only--I haven't
hurt anything, Mr. Pendarves; I--I only scrubbed--and cooked--and
cleaned a little. I was so happy: there was no harm, it seemed to me.
And when I pretended to be the housekeeper, that--that was just a little
game I played with myself; it was silly, I dare say, but, after all, it
did no harm, either. It was like another game I play by myself
sometimes--of having a birthday, you know? I put little things I've made
beside the bed, and when I wake up in the morning, I make believe it's
my birthday, and I'm so surprised at all the presents I've got! It's
silly, isn't it?' I knew you'd laugh."

"I never felt less like it," I said. "Don't you know your real
birthday?"

She shook her head. No, she did not know that. She had never known
anything about her father and mother. She was not even certain of her
own name. "He calls me Zaira," she said, with a scornful jerk of her
auburn head toward the other room; "but that's a stupid name, and I hate
it. I tell every one my name's Mary Smith. Why not? I might as well call
myself what I like--nobody cares. I think Mary Smith's beautiful, don't
you? It's so respectable, isn't it?" she added wistfully.

Of her childhood she could remember nothing but being in some sort of
school or institution (a home for foundlings, most likely) governed by
nuns, or at least by women who went about in black stuff dresses and
white caps, and whom one called _ma soeur_--for this was in southern
France, she thought. The life was clean, decorous, and peaceful, and she
might have grown up to wear a white cap herself, and herd little waifs
into chapel; but when she was probably ten or eleven years old, the fat
man came and took her away, and they had been wandering up and down the
world ever since. He said he was her uncle, but she was no more sure of
that than of anything else concerning herself.

When they had been in Chepstow a time, she said, her uncle came into
their fortune-telling booth one day with Captain Pendarves, whose name
she did not then know. He talked a great deal in an excited way about
finding some treasure----"money I think h