"Buy me a man!" she echoed—"You think it would?"
"Of course it would!" Manella averred—"If you wanted one, which I daresay you don't. For all I know, you may be like the man who is living in the consumption hut on the hill,—he ought to have a woman, but he doesn't want one."
Morgana buttered her little breakfast roll very delicately.
"The man who lives in the consumption hut on the hill!" she repeated, slowly, and with a smile—"What man is that?"
"I don't know—" and Manella's large dark eyes filled with a strangely wistful perplexity. "He is a stranger—and he's not ill at all. He is big and strong and healthy. But he has chosen to live in the 'house of the dying,' as it is sometimes called—where people from the Plaza go when there's no more hope for them. He likes to be quite alone—he thinks and writes all day. I take him milk and bread,—it is all he orders from the Plaza. I would be his woman. I would work for him from morning till night. But he will not have me."
Morgana raised her eyes, glittering with the "fey" light in them that often bewildered and rather scared her friends.
"You would be his woman? You are in love with him?" she said.
Something in her look checked Manella's natural impulse to confide in one of her own sex.
"No, I am not!"—she answered coldly—"I have said too much."
Morgana smiled, and stretching out her small white hand, adorned with its sparkling rings, laid it caressingly on the girl's brown wrist.