The phrase had touched her more than the money had done. Motey, as are so many servants, was lavishly generous, and she had helped with her legacy several worthless relations of her own to start small businesses which invariably failed. These losses, however, she bore with great philosophy. Her home was wherever her darling, her 'young lady,' her 'ma'am,' happened to be, and her circle that of the family with whose fortunes hers had now been bound up for so many years. Mrs. Robinson's faithful affection for this old servant was one of the best traits in a somewhat capricious if generous character, the more so that the maid by no means always approved of even her mistress's most innocent actions and associates. Thus, she had first felt a rough contempt, and later a fierce dislike, of poor Melancthon Robinson. There were two people, both men, whom Motey would have been willing to see more often with her mistress. The one was David Winfrith, who, if now a successful, almost it might be said a famous man, had played a rather inglorious part in Penelope's first love affair. The other was young Lord Wantley, of whom the old nurse had constituted herself the champion in the days when her master and mistress had merely regarded the presence of the nervous, sensitive boy as an unpleasant duty. Mrs. Mote's liking for these two young men was completely subordinate to her love for her nursling; she would cheerfully have seen either of them undergo the most unpleasant ordeal had Penelope thereby been saved the smallest pain or hurt. In fact, it was because she well knew how stanch a friend Winfrith could be, and how useful, in perhaps a slightly whimsical way, Lord Wantley had more than once proved himself in his cousin's service, that she would have preferred to see more of these two and less of certain others. Ah, those others! There had always been a side of Mrs. Robinson's nature which thirsted for sentimental adventure, and yet of the three women who in their several ways loved her supremely--her mother, Cecily Wake, and the old nurse--only the last was really aware of this craving for romantic encounter. Mrs. Mote had too often found herself compelled to stand inactive in the wings of the stage on which her mistress was wont to take part in mimic, but none the less dangerous, combat, for her to remain ignorant of many things, not only unsuspected, but in a sense unthinkable, by either the austere mother or the girl friend. Perhaps this blindness in those who yet loved her well was owing to the fact that, in the ordinary sense of the term, Penelope was no flirt. Indeed, those among her friends who belonged to a society which, if over-civilized, is perhaps the more ready to extend a large measure of sympathy to those of its number who feel an overmastering impulse to revert, in affairs of the heart, to primitive nature, regarded the beautiful widow as singularly free from the temptations with which they were themselves so sorely beset.