"So France has a partial claim, on you, too?" remarked Mallory, unfolding his napkin.
"Yes—a great-grandmother. I let her take the burden of all my sins."
"Not a very heavy one, I imagine," he returned, smiling.
"I don't know. Sometimes"—Nan's eyes grew suddenly pensive—"sometimes I feel that one day I shall do something which will make the burden too heavy to be shunted on to great-grandmamma! Then I'll have to bear it myself, I suppose."
"There'll be a pal or two around, to give you a hand with it, I expect," answered Mallory.
"I don't know if there will even be that," she answered dreamily. "Do you know, I've always had the idea that sometime or other I shall get myself into an awful hole and that there won't be a single soul in the world to get me out of it."
She spoke with an odd note of prescience in her voice. It was so pronounced that the sense of foreboding communicated itself to Mallory.
"Don't talk like that. If you think it, you'll be carried forward to just such disaster on the current of the thought. Be sure—quite, quite sure—that there will be someone at hand, even if it's only me"—quaintly.
"The Good Samaritan again? But you mightn't know I was in a difficulty," she protested.
"I think I should always know if you were in trouble," he said quietly.