"No thought of yours, however I regard it, but is sure of my sympathy--because it's yours," he answered. As though she had not heard, she went on. "I was an orphan. I never knew my father and mother. The first things I remember are of the country--perhaps that is why I love the out-of-doors--the sky through my window, filled with huge, puffy, ice-cream clouds, a little new-born pig that somebody put in my bed one morning--daisy-fields like snow--and the darling peep-peep-peep of little bunches of yellow down that I was always trying to catch and never succeeding. I couldn't say _chicken_. I always said _shicken_" She paused. With that tenderness which every woman entertains for her own little girlhood, she smiled. "I've told you of the five white birches. I was looking at them and naming them on my fingers the day that Aunt Paula came. My childhood ended there. I seemed to grow up all at once." Blake muttered something inarticulate. But at her look of inquiry, he merely said. "Go on!" "She isn't really my aunt by blood,--Aunt Paula isn't. You understand--my father and her husband were brothers. They all died--everybody died but just Aunt Paula and me. So she took me away with her. And after that it was always the dreadful noise and confusion of New York, with only my one doll--black Dinah--a rag-baby. I thought," she interrupted herself wistfully, "I'd send Dinah to you when I got back to New York. Would you like her?" "Like her--like her! My--my--" But he swallowed his words. "Go on!" He commanded again.