No; no one was dead.
“Well, then!” I exclaimed triumphantly, “that is all I need to know. Tell me—and we can do something, at any rate.”
Bit by bit she told me, pulling at her trim little cuffs, twirling the head of the pink, rolling the go-cart until Little Charge smiled as upon an unexpectedly beneficent world.
And the trouble was—how, I wondered as I listened, could I ever have doubted that the world is the shape of a heart—the trouble was that Little Nursemaid had intended to elope that very day, and now she couldn’t!
Cornelia Emmeline Ayres, for so she subsequently told me that she was called, was by her own admission pathetically situated.
“I am a orphan nursemaid, ma’am,” she confessed, shaking her brown head in pleasant self-pity.
Briefly, she was living with a well-to-do family just off the avenue, who had cared for her mother in her last illness and had taken charge of Cornelia herself when she was a child. She had grown up in the family as that most pitiful of all creatures, an unpaid dependant, who is supposed to have all the advantages of a home and in reality has only its discomforts. Until a year ago the life of the little maid had been colourless enough, and then the Luminous Inevitable happened. He was a young drug clerk. He had had two “rises” of salary within seven months, probably, I surmised, averaging some seventy-five cents each. And she had fourteen dollars of her own.
“Well, well,” said I in bewilderment, “what more do you want? Why wait?”
“Oh, ma’am,” sobbed Cornelia Emmeline, “it’s the unthankfulness I’m bothered about. Why, She raised me an’ I just can’t a-bear to leave Her like this.”
“What does She say about it?” I inquired, gathering from the reverential tone of the pronoun that the Shrewd Benefactress was in her mind. O, these women whose charity takes the form of unpaid servants who have “homes” in return.