Hilda, I gathered, was the maid.

I found myself liking her at once. She was as plain as an old shoe. Queer how one can hear of people for years, dislike them on principle, and then meet them and fall for them. I fell for Maud Wainwright that day with a crash—braid, bedroom slippers, and all.

She offered me a cigarette and took one herself. Then she looked at me, smiling.

“Well, Miss Abbott, what about this mess I’m in?”

“I don’t know,” I said cautiously. “Is it a mess?”

“That seems to be the general idea. See here, what’s your first name? Or do you mind? It’s more friendly, I think.”

“I’m generally called Pat.”

“Pat,” she repeated. “I like it. Short for Patricia, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a pretty name. Mine is Maud. You know: ‘Come into the garden, Maud.’ It’s revolting, isn’t it?”

I thought, for all her lightness, she was studying me. Not subtly. She was never a subtle woman; but with the semi-direct frankness with which children survey strange people. And I must have been strange to her, God knows, sitting there in that vast house of hers; a fair sample of the unprotected young woman, thrown on the world to sink or swim. When that day I had driven up the hill in my old car and faced the vast mass of the Cloisters, I had very nearly turned back. It had loomed at the end of the drive like a combination of the Capitol at Washington and the new Beverly High School, with a touch of the city courthouse thrown in, and it had frankly scared me.

But I was not frightened now. I think if anything I was amused. She put out her cigarette and sat upright.

“Tell me a little about yourself, Pat. That’s only fair. If you stay on, as I hope you will, you will know all about me very soon. Dr. Sterling says you are—well, alone. Have you no family?”

“My father and mother are both dead,” I said, my throat tightening.

“Never mind. I’m sorry, my dear. I suppose things weren’t too good after they had gone.”

“They have been pretty bad,” I said frankly. “I have some real estate, mostly unoccupied or mortgaged. Not much else. If you think I can do the work—”

“Of course you can. I only hope you like us here. We’ll do our best to make you happy.”

Yes, that is what she said. I was to be happy. Everything was to be as cheerful as a morning in May. And it was easy to believe it that day, with the June breeze drifting in through the windows, Maud Wainwright’s friendly smile, and the French doors open onto that roof garden of hers, built over a lower wing, bright with early flowers, and with a big mastiff asleep there in the sun. Happy and luxurious, there in the boudoir with its thick white rug, its pale-gray walls and its powder-blue and rose and yellow covered chairs and chaise longue. And outside, partly hidden by the shrubbery, that awful playhouse of hers, with all it was to mean to us later.