Nan must have this; Nan must not do that. It was her duty to protect Nan and guard her. She followed the girl in perilous journeys; she tried to guide her from dangerous courses. She betrayed her anxious care for her in every word she uttered. And then sometimes she would say something that Nan could not comprehend.
"Florence's child!" she would murmur. "Florence's child!" and then she would catch herself back with a sudden look of fear as though she had betrayed a secret.
"My mother's name was Florence," Nan would say brokenly. "But I don't know what she means. She never knew my mother."
At last came a change, and then Nan was excluded from the room.
"You might excite her, and she must be carefully guarded against any chance of that," the doctor said in explanation.
But Nan was almost too happy to care. The first sound of the low, sweet voice speaking intelligently sent a thrill of passionate gratitude to her heart.
How she and Delia plotted and planned for the invalid. How Nan made the room to fairly blossom with the flowers that daily came pouring in from all manner of strange and unexpected sources.
"I never knew she had such lots of friends," the girl said one day to Delia.
The woman looked down at her with a flash of superior understanding in her eyes.
"She's a wise one," she said. "She goes her own way, and it's little she asks of any one and it's less she says. But what she does ain't little, I can tell you, Nan. I know of many a thing she's done for those who, if they haven't got money, have the grateful hearts in them to remember kindness and to love the one that shows it to them. Some day you'll know her for what she is, and then you'll never strive against her any more and you'll love her as many another has done before you."