im on Mercedes. I didn't take to the
Bastidas. But I stayed on because of Mercedes. I got to be a sort of
nurse for her, you may say. Well, as she got older, and prettier and
prettier, and everyone just crazy about her, I saw she didn't have much
use for me. I didn't judge her too hard; but I began to see through her
then. She'd behaved mighty bad to me again and again, she used to fly at
me and bite me and tear my hair, when she was a child, if I thwarted
her; but I always believed she really loved me; perhaps she did, as much
as she can. But after these rich folks turned up and her life got so
bright and easy she just seemed to forget all about me. So I went home.

"I stayed home for four or five years and then Mercedes sent for me. She
used to write now and then to her 'Dearest Tallie' as she always called
me, and I'd heard all about how she'd come out in Paris and Vienna as a
great pianist, and how she'd quarrelled with her relations and how she'd
run away with a young English painter and got married to him. It was an
awful silly match, and they'd all opposed it; but it pleased me somehow.
I thought it showed that Mercedes was soft-hearted like her mother, and
unworldly. Well, she wrote that she was miserable and that her husband
was a fiend and broke her heart and that she hated all her relations and
they'd all behaved like serpents to her--Mercedes is always running
across serpents--and how I was the only true friend she had and the only
one who understood her, and how she longed for her dear Tallie. So I
sold out again--I'd just started a sort of little farm near the old
place in Maine, raising chickens and making jam--and came over again. I
don't know what it is about Mercedes, but she gets a hold over you. And
guess I always felt like she was my own baby. I had a baby, but it died
when it was born. Well, she was living in Paris then and they had a fine
flat and a big studio, and when Mercedes got into a passion with her
husband she'd take a knife and slash up his canvases. She quarrelled
with him day and night, and I wasn't long with them before I saw that it
was all her fault and that he was a weak, harmless sort of young
creature--he had yellow hair, longish, and used to wear a black velvet
cap and paint sort of dismal pictures of girls with long necks and wild
sort of eyes--but that the truth was she was sick of him and wanted to
marry the Baron von Marwitz.

"You can commence to get hold of the story now, K