She rested her hands on the edge of the bowl an instant. "About us?" she said, with a quick glance at me. She gave the dough one or two perfunctory pats and punches, biting her lips; and then suddenly, with a rush of color, her face puckered together, she clapped her befloured hands over it, and fell on the nearest bench in a perfect whirlwind of sobs.
"I—I—I w-w-wanted to be respectable!" was all I could make out between gasps—but that was staggering enough news, I thought. She wanted to be respectable!
She went on: "I didn't come here of my own free will, Mr. Pendarves, truly I didn't; but when we came, and I saw how nice I could make it,—and I never had a home before,—I knew, if you ever came back, that would end it all, and I did so hope you wouldn't!"
"It seemed a pity not to make hay while the sun shone?" I suggested.
She nodded, a little doubtfully. "I didn't think of it just that way," she said. "But—yes, I suppose any one would put it so. Only—I haven't hurt anything, Mr. Pendarves; I—I only scrubbed—and cooked—and cleaned a little. I was so happy: there was no harm, it seemed to me. And when I pretended to be the housekeeper, that—that was just a little game I played with myself; it was silly, I dare say, but, after all, it did no harm, either. It was like another game I play by myself sometimes—of having a birthday, you know? I put little things I've made beside the bed, and when I wake up in the morning, I make believe it's my birthday, and I'm so surprised at all the presents I've got! It's silly, isn't it?' I knew you'd laugh."
"I never felt less like it," I said. "Don't you know your real birthday?"
She shook her head. No, she did not know that. She had never known anything about her father and mother. She was not even certain of her own name. "He calls me Zaira," she said, with a scornful jerk of her auburn head toward the other room; "but that's a stupid name, and I hate it. I tell every one my name's Mary Smith. Why not? I might as well call myself what I like—nobody cares. I think Mary Smith's beautiful, don't you? It's so respectable, isn't it?" she added wistfully.
Of her childhood she could remember nothing but being in some sort of school or institution (a home for foundlings, most likely) governed by nuns, or at least by women who went about in black stuff dresses and white caps, and whom one called ma sœur—for this was in southern France, she thought. The life was clean, decorous, and peaceful, and she might have grown up to wear a white cap herself, and herd little waifs into chapel; but when she was probably ten or eleven years old, the fat man came and took her away, and they had been wandering up and down the world ever since. He said he was her uncle, but she was no more sure of that than of anything else concerning herself.
When they had been in Chepstow a time, she said, her uncle came into their fortune-telling booth one day with Captain Pendarves, whose name she did not then know. He talked a great deal in an excited way about finding some treasure——"money I think he said his father or grandfather had hidden a long while ago. He kept saying it would all be in 'doubloons, doubloons,' because it was got in the Spanish Main and brought here in a ship. And he said there was treasure, heaps of it, in the bottom of the Cat's Mouth, where ships had sunk, gold pieces all in amongst the ribs of dead men. Mr. Pendarves,"—she looked at me with a shy, awed sympathy,—"I saw your grandfather was—was——"
"He is crazy, or nearly so," said I. "Plain talk is best."