Isn't she the most _human_
thing!"

"Do you remember Maeterlinck's theory that every soul summons--"

Lydia interrupted to say with a wry, humorous mouth, "You know I don't
know anything. Don't ask me if I remember things."

"Well, Maeterlinck has one of his fanciful theories that everybody calls
to him from the unknown those elements that he most needs, which are
most in harmony with--"

"I caught a good solid element that time," cried Lydia, laughing again.

"She's embodied Loyalty," said the doctor. "It breathes from every
pore."

"She's going to smash my cut glass and china something awful," Lydia
foretold.

Dr. Melton took his godchild by the shoulders and shook her. "Now, Lydia
Emery, you listen to me! I don't often issue an absolute command, if I
am your physician, but I do now. You _let_ her smash your china and cut
glass, and all the rest of your devastating trash she can lay her hands
on, rather than lose her--until after September, anyhow! It's a direct
reward of virtue for your having shipped the 'ould divil'!"

Lydia's face clouded. "I'm afraid Paul won't think her much of a
substitute for Ellen," she murmured, "and we'll have to find a cook
somehow even if this one learns enough to be second girl."

"Second girl!" ejaculated the doctor. "She's a human being with a
capacity for loyalty."

"She's evidently awfully incompetent--"

The doctor snorted. "Competence--I loathe the word! It's used now to
cover all imaginable sins, as folks used to excuse all manner of
rascality in a good swordsman. We're beyond the frontier period now when
competence was a matter of life and death. We ought to begin to have
some glimmering realization that there are other--"

"_Oh_, what a hand for talk!" said Lydia.

The doctor rejoiced at her laughing impatience. He thought to himself,
as he looked at her standing in the doorway and waving good-by to him,
that she seemed a very different creature from the drooping and
tearful--he interrupted his chain of thought as he boarded his car, to
exclaim, "May she live long, that heavy-handed, vivifying Celt!"

CHAPTER XXII

THE VOICES IN THE WOOD

Lydia had not been mistaken in her premonition of Paul's attitude toward
the new maid. He found her quite unendurable, but the direful stories
told by their Bellevue acquaintances about the literal impossibility of
keeping servants during the hot season induced him to postpone his wrath
against the awkward, irrevere