But Nannie, with a soft rush across the room, darted in front of her and stood with her back against the door, panting. "Mamma! Wait. You must listen to me!" Her stepmother paused, looking at her with mild astonishment. She was like another creature, a little wild creature standing at bay to protect its young. "You have no right," Nannie said sternly, "you have no right, Mother, to treat Blair so. Listen to me: it was not--not nice in him to run away with Elizabeth; I know that, though I think it was more her fault than his. But it wasn't wicked! He loved her." "My dear, I haven't said it was wicked," Blair's mother tried to explain; "in fact, I don't think it was; it wasn't big enough to be wicked. No, it was only a dirty, contemptible trick." Nannie cringed back, her hand gripping the knob behind her. "If Blair had been a hard-working man, knocking up against other hard-working men, trying to get food for his belly and clothes for his nakedness, he'd have been ashamed to play such a trick--he'd have been a man. If I had loved him more I'd have made a man of him; I'd have made work real to him, not make-believe, as I did. And I wouldn't have been ashamed of him, as I am now." "I think," said Nannie, with one of those flashes of astuteness so characteristic of the simple mind, "that a man would fall in love just as much if he were poor as if he were rich; and--and you ought to forgive him, Mamma." Mrs. Maitland half smiled: "I guess there's no making you understand, Nannie; you are like your own mother. Come! Open this door! I've got to go to work." But Nannie still stood with her hand gripping the knob. "I must tell you," she said in a low voice: "I must not be untruthful to you, Mamma: I will give Blair all I have myself. The money my father left me shall be his; and--and everything I may ever have shall be his." Then she seemed to melt away before her stepmother, and the door banged softly between them. "Poor little soul!" Sarah Maitland said to herself, smiling, as she sat down at her desk in the dining-room. "Exactly like her mother! I must give her a present." The next day she sent for her general manager and told him what course she had taken with her son. He was silent for a moment; then he said, with an effort, "I have no reason to plead Blair's cause, but you're not fair, you know." "So Nannie has informed me," she said dryly. Then she leaned back in her chair and tapped her desk with one big finger. "Go on; say what you like. It won't move me one hair." Robert Ferguson said a good deal. He pointed out that she had no right, having crippled Blair, to tell him to run a race. "You've made him what he is. Well, it's done; it can't be undone. But you are rushing to the other extreme; you needn't leave him millions, of course; but leave him a reasonable fortune."