"I'm used to doing little things about the house," she answered. "Before I came here I was a companion in a family." The statement was made on the spur of the moment, but as Hertha thought it over she was delighted that she had been able to say something that opened up a way to live in the past without embarrassment, almost without falsehood. To conjure up the world of white people in her grandfather's home had been beyond her power; even in her thoughts she had stumbled in her endeavor to climb the ladder that led to their eminence. But as a companion in the Merryvale household she was in familiar surroundings. Richard Brown on his part was a little disappointed. He had been dreaming of a princess in disguise and he found only a poor relation. In the large families of the South there were sometimes girls like this, though when they were so pretty they usually soon married, girls who had to do the odd tasks, give up the good times, go to live with some distant cousin or aunt as the case might be. That sort of thing made a girl shy and quiet. For the first time that evening he felt at ease. "I bet there ain't anybody in New York can make cocoa to beat yours,", he declared emphatically. "I never liked the stuff before." "I should have made you coffee," Hertha said regretfully. "I forgot, because coffee keeps me awake." "Does me, too." He was ready to agree with anything. "Now, down home, tramping through the woods, I could drink a dozen cups a day. But it's different in the city." "Were your woods pines?" she asked, "and were there streams with cypresses by the banks?" Here at last they had found a meeting place, a common ground. If she would not play or laugh with him, they could wander through the woods together, tasting the tang of the evergreen or watching the buds burst on the wild plum. Drawing his chair a little forward, he hugged his knee and sang the song of the country of his birth. Outside the rain splashed upon the street, making great puddles at the crossings, the wind blew fiercely down the narrow roadways and shook the windows in their frames; but within the little tenement the southern boy moved without a cloud to shadow him through the playtime of his years. Sometimes it was winter and he was among the hills trapping birds and shooting rabbits. Again it was early spring and with rod in hand he trailed the brown stream until the trout rose and brought him all attention to the game they played that through his skill ended in death and victory. Or it was summer and too hot to walk, but glorious to gallop in the early morning over the rough road and down the hollow to where the brook broadened into a swimming-pool that called him to bathe in its reviving water. Again he moved among the woods in autumn, hunting, but not too intent upon his game to fail to find the nuts scattered upon his path or to stop and, putting his hand in a hole of a decaying tree, bring out a blinking, monkey-faced owl.