"On one of those—those times in New York when we talked together," he said, "you told me that when something very marvellous had happened to you and you couldn't believe you were awake, that it was really true, you asked your Godmother to pinch you. It—er, wouldn't be at all proper for me to ask you to please pinch me. But if you know any perfectly proper equivalent, I wish you'd do it."
"I've pinched myself," she returned, "and it seems I am awake. So I judge you must be, too."
"Then how, please——?"
And she told him.
"And you don't know yet who I am?"
"No."
So he told her. "I warned you it was nothing interesting," he said; "it is just my work that people are interested in. I don't belong in there," indicating the great house, "any more than you do. They like me for a novelty, because I've dared and suffered; and because, as things turned out, I was in a position to do what they are pleased to call a great service to the Empire. I wish I liked them better—they want to be very kind to me, and I was born of them, so they like me the better for that. But I've been in the wilderness too much—I can't get used to these strange folk at home."
"I used to think I couldn't get used to strange folk," Mary Alice murmured, "but I seem to have got on fairly well for a girl from Nowhere."
"Was it the Secret?"
She nodded.