"Do you?" the pale lady repeated. "It was at a party given for me by some friends that I first met Laird. Then--_then_--the beautiful old home was already lost; the dear old people who had owned it and who had brought me up to know nothing but the good things of life, had lost their all--everything had been swept away, and they had died, broken-hearted. Other friends had taken me in--for a time. I met Laird. Of course I _had_ to marry. All my friends said so. There was nothing else for me to do--absolutely penniless as I was. But," and she smiled suddenly, and it was such a lovely, revealing smile that Carolyn, too, broke into smiles, "they did not have to urge me to marry Laird. I loved him from the first, you see." "Oh, yes," said Carolyn May, earnestly. "That is just how it was with my Uncle Joe Stagg and Miss Amanda Parlow. _They_ were loving each other for years an' years and at last they just _had_ to get married." "We did not have to wait years and years," said Carolyn's friend. "People said we ought, for Laird--well! he had nothing at all when I married him but his two bare hands. But he is going to earn plenty for us--for Baby and me--some day." She sighed. She looked around the poor room. All the glory of remembrance went out of her face and her eyes misted with unbidden tears. It was some time before she spoke again and the game of "If I Were Rich" was ended for that afternoon. "But," said Carolyn May, in telling her mother all about it, "my pale lady must have been truly rich once. She don't have to supposing when she plays my game. She lived in a great house--big as the public library down on Fifth Avenue, I guess--only without those funny lions in front. And she had automobiles and _every_thing. "But of course," concluded the little girl, within whose breast stirred already the true instinct of motherhood, "I s'pose she thinks Baby Laird makes up for everything she's lost." CHAPTER VIII A GREAT DEAL HAPPENS There was a mystery about the pale lady, and a mystery delighted Carolyn May just as it delights something like nine-tenths of the human race. The mystery of the fourth dimension, or perpetual motion, or the problems of alchemy thrill the scientific mind no more than do their neighbours' secrets interest the ordinary person. The little girl wanted very much to know why the pale lady's husband was so poor. Even if she had been poor, Laird, as the pale lady called him, must have come of wealthy people; or how had she met him at the party given by her friends? Now, this was rather an involved thought for a little girl to work out in her mind; but Carolyn May's was not an ordinary child's mind. She was no prodigy. However, she had spent most of her time with grown folk. She had few playmates of her own age. And her father made Carolyn May much his companion.