"Tell me about the marmalade maid," Nina begged, sitting down and taking Tara's head in her lap. "The maid of Dundee."
"I was visiting a man I knew in Tahiti," Nibbetts answered frankly. "And it happens he has a niece. I ran away from her."
"Why?" Nina asked simply.
"For the best reason in the world," he told her. "I was getting to like her too well. That's why I'm here this morning. You're a perfectly incomparable antidote for that sort of thing."
"She's like her marmalade, perhaps—too cloyingly sweet," said Nina, indifferently.
"Her marmalade?" questioned Nibbetts, his brow knitting.
"Doesn't she make it, then? I can't think of Dundee in any other connection. Don't all the women there peel oranges?"
"She doesn't." He could be very literal at times.
"What does she do? How in the world does she spend her time?"
"She spends most of it, I fancy, talking to her parrot."