"Oh, but, my dear," said Mrs. Leitzel nervously, "Danny give me the money to pay my way back home and he thinks I went. And you see, it would put the girls out to have to make up the spare bed just for me."
"But who could be more important than you—you who took care of them all when they were children? Indeed I shan't let you go a step to-day."
"Did they tell you I took care of them, my dear?" asked Mrs. Leitzel, puzzled. "Because they never talked to me that way. And Danny tried to show me this after, when I put it to him that now I couldn't hold out no longer to support myself gardening on the old place—he said I hadn't no claim on him. I don't know," she added sadly, "what I'll do. I'm too old and feeble to work any more, my dear. God knows I would if I could. I'd work for all of them as well as for myself, the way I used to, if I had strength to. But I come in to-day to tell Danny that at last I'm done out. Yes, the doctor says I got tendencies and things and that I got to be awful careful."
"'Tendencies?'" asked Margaret.
"He says I got somepin stickin' in me."
"Something sticking in you! Do you mean that you swallowed a bone or something?"
"No, my dear, I didn't swallow nothin'. I got a tendency stickin' in me that might give pneumonia. So I come to ask Danny to-day if—if he couldn't mebby spare me something," she faltered, "to live on for the little time I got left, so that"—a childlike fear in her aged eyes—"I don't have to go to the poorhouse!"
"When you told Danny all this," asked Margaret, laying her hand on Mrs. Leitzel's, "he said you had no claim on him?"
The old woman's lips quivered and she pressed them together for an instant before she answered.
"He told me he'd talk it all over oncet with Hiram and the girls. But," she shook her head, "I'm afraid Hiram's less merciful than any of my children and he'll urge 'em to put me to such a home for paupers; and, oh, Margaret—dare I call you Margaret?"