"Ne'er a word," answered Ruth, casual and teasing—"only it was no-account talk. That's all I remember."
"I pointed you out Mr. Trupp's house," Ernie continued solemnly, "and I says to you—He brought me into the world, I says. That's what he done."
The old roguish black-bird look, which after her winter of despair had been creeping slowly back to Ruth's face in this new spring, gleamed sedately now.
"I mind me now," she said. "Leastwise I don't remember what you said, but I remembers what I answered."
"What did you answer then?" asked Ernie, suspiciously.
"He done well, was what I says," answered the young woman gravely.
"He did," replied Ernie with exaggerated pomp. "And he done better to settle issalf at my door so I could be his friend if so be he ever gotten into trouble."
"One thing I knaw," said Ruth, serious in her turn now. "They're the two best friends e'er a workin woman had."
"They are," Ernie agreed. "And she's my god-mother."
It was the fact in his life of which on the whole he was most proud and certainly the one for which he was least responsible. "And she aren't yours," he continued, puffed up and self-complacent. "And never will be." He added finally to curb her arrogance. "See she was dad's friend afore ever they married, eether of them."