"I hear," he said, and again his lean face lighted oddly from within, "I hear, God save you kindly, and I'm rare and thankful to you, Jane Vail!"



CHAPTER VII

The doorbell cut jaggedly into Jane's exalted mood and she went into the office and sat down to work on the Merry Christmas sign. She meant to replace it with a joyful scarlet one, but meanwhile it would keep her fingers busy and give her an excuse for lingering until Ethel came back with the news of her confession and its results, and she could be planning the holiday cheer she meant to make in this melancholy house. She was still rather startled at her sudden decision but pleased with herself beyond words. To give up the festive return to the village ... her Aunt Lydia's damp-eyed delight, the "little gatherings of the young people" in her honor, the gay and jingling joy of the season ... and stay in a boarding house and make determined merriment for the Agnes Chatterton home. Then, tracing a large and ugly M, she laughed aloud. The truth was, she told herself flatly, she was pleased to the marrow of her bones to be here instead of there, not only in fresh fields and pastures thrillingly and picturesquely new, but away from the reckless necessity for settling the Marty Wetherby matter once and for all. And the big Irishman seemed almost pathetically pleased at her announcement, and it was entirely conceivable that Rodney Harrison would provide flesh-pots and diversions. All in all, she was cannily glad to abide by her hasty and handsome offer, and she worked steadily at her letters while Mrs. Richards wrote at her littered desk.

The doorbell rang again and Mrs. Richards peered out into the hall.

"Well, there's Irene, come for Billiken! That doesn't look much as if Ethel had told him." There was a good deal of triumph in the glance she flung at Jane. "Well, I can't say I'm surprised; I didn't think she'd have the courage."

Michael Daragh came in, his face grave. "Here's Irene, come for the child. I don't like the look of it."

"Well, I'm not surprised," said Mrs. Richards again.

A young woman presented herself at the office door. There was resolute respectability in her blue serge suit, brushed shiny, too thin for December wear. She carried a small straw telescope and her voice sounded capable and firm. "Can I go right up, Mrs. Richards?"

"Why, I suppose you may as well, Irene. You've come for Billiken?"

"Yes. I'm taking her on the night-boat."

"Wait," said the Irishman, as she turned toward the stairs. "Did Ethel tell him?"

"You mean, did she tell Jerry about—about the baby?" The good sister of the erring sister flushed painfully. "Not that I've heard of. I guess she knows better than that."

"There is no 'better than that,'" said Michael Daragh, sternly. "There is nothing better than the truth." The line of his lean jaw was salient.

"If I can once get her respectably married," said Irene, nippingly, her small face resolute, "I won't worry about what she tells or doesn't tell. It's been hard enough on me, I can tell you!" She went briskly upstairs and they heard her firm closing of the door.

"You see?" the matron wanted to know.

"I'm fearing we've lost the fight," said Michael Daragh.

Jane insisted on hope. "Perhaps she did tell him, and everything's all right, but she had no chance to see Irene and explain! Surely you won't let her take Billiken until we are sure?"

Then the front door opened quietly and Ethel came in to stand before them, her tragic and accusing eyes on Jane. "You made me tell," she said. "You made me!" And when Jane ran to her, questioning, eager, she pushed her away. "It's you! It's you did it!"

Michael Daragh strode to her and put a steadying arm about her shoulders. "Child, tell us the way of it."

Her teeth were chattering and her face seemed to grow whiter and whiter. "I told him. I told him everything. I kept saying to myself over and over, all the way to the store, just what she told me"—she flung a bruised and bitter look at Jane—"'I must love him more than I want him'—and I went straight up to him at his counter, right there in the daytime. He was selling a necktie to a fat old man with a red neck. It was a dark blue tie with light blue spots on it." She added the detail carefully in her spent little voice. "I waited until he was gone and then I told Jerry. He just looked at me and looked at me, and made me say it again, and then—then he just walked away without looking back. I had to go to work, but I watched and watched, and watched. He never came back to his counter. Pretty soon I just got crazy. I went over and asked. They said he was sick, and gone home." She sagged in Michael Daragh's hands and he lifted her and carried her into the matron's room, the matron hurrying beside him.

Then Jane Vail sat alone in the ugly office, contemplating the result of her eloquence. She could hear Ethel's sobbing and the matron's sharp treble, and the steady and rhythmic flow of the Irishman's voice. She rose to follow them, but the closed door halted her. They had wanted her to do this thing, to do the thing they had failed to do, and she had done it; and now they shut her away while they strove to heal where she had hurt.

Why had she done it? Why had she come at all? Why had she mixed and muddled in this sordid tangle which was none of her bright business? And why—chief of all whys—had she rashly and sentimentally offered to give up her holidays at home for the futile endeavor to make Christmas merry for these miserable girls?

Rage rose in her, rage at herself, rage at the sobbing, tarnished girlhood in there, at her sharp sister, at the matron, at the zealot who had dragged her into it all. Let him take Emma Ellis next time. This was her work, and she—Jane Vail—belonged in the world of clean and pretty things and in that world she would stay. She decided against undignified flight; she would wait for Michael Daragh and walk home with him to Mrs. Hills' boarding house, and she would be very civil about it all, but she would make it clear, even to an other-worldly settlement worker, that her brief detour into this sort of thing was finished; that she was on the highway again, speeding toward the place she had visioned for herself.

Now she drove her mind resolutely away from the Agnes Chatterton Home, to the Vermont village, then across the sea ... Florence ... the old palaces ... the Arno ... the little tea room in the Via Tornabuoni where she went sometimes at this very hour ... little heart-shaped cakes with green icing—Upstairs three babies began to scream at once, harshly and hideously, and an opened door somewhere at the rear of the house confessed to cabbage for dinner, and the present came swiftly and unbeautifully back. It came back with a bang. Jane resolutely set herself to think the thing out clearly. If the matron or the Irishman had persuaded Ethel to divulge her dark young past to her suitor, he would have repudiated her just the same; therefore she—Jane—might shake off her mantle of guilty responsibility. And after all, bleak as life looked to the little creature now, still sobbing stormily in Mrs. Richards' room, wasn't she safer than she would be married to her Jerry with that stalking secret?—"Whose happiness resteth upon a lie is as a spirit in prison." The whole world, the whole godly, gossiping, ferreting world, would have conspired together to tell him. Now she climbed nimbly to secure conviction in the eternal justice of things. The girl had gone gallantly, in garish daylight, holding her happiness in her hand, and told the truth. Now she was in the dust, but wouldn't it all come right for her in the end? Wouldn't it have to come right for her? The sense of helpless misery fell away from her and she was so confident of coming joy that she started toward the closed door of the matron's room. No; she would not go in, but she was warm with comfort. It seemed close and breathless in the office and she went to the street door and opened it for a swallow of the keen winter air, and stood out upon the top step, looking down into the dingy thoroughfare. There was a young man, half a block away, on the opposite side. He was walking slowly, looking at the numbers on the houses, and presently he looked across at the Agnes Chatterton Home. Then he stood quite still, staring at it.

Gladness and certainty rose in Jane and she beckoned to him.

He came over very slowly, and mounted the steps with lagging feet, and he was still staring, his eyes rather dazed.

"Oh," said Jane, "I think I know who you are!" She was a little breathless with happy excitement. "Aren't you—I don't know the rest of your name, but aren't you—Jerry?"

"Yes, ma'am," said the youth. There was a close color harmony about him; his jubilant cravat picked up the dominant note of his striped silk shirt and the royal purple of his hose struck it again, an octave lower. The removal of his velvet hat disclosed wide and flanging ears which gave his face an expression of quaint comedy, now at variance with his aghast and solemn look.

Jane's bright presence there on that dreary doorstep, her hailing of him, her knowledge of his identity, seemed to awake no wonder in him. He looked as if he had finished with surprise; as if nothing could ever startle him again.

"I want to see Ethel," he said.

"Yes!" said Jane, gladly. "Come!"

She left him in the correct and cheerless little reception room and flew up the headlong stairs and into Ethel's room, her face luminous. The good sister was just finishing her packing of Billiken's belongings into the telescope and the child, snug in tiny sweater and knitted cap, watched her absorbedly. Jane caught her up without a word and carried her out of the room.

"I'm about ready to go," the young woman called after her, sharply. "Please don't take her things off!"

Jane did not answer her. She sped down the stairs as swiftly and easily as a person in a dream, and opened the closed door boldly, without even a knock, and marched in, Billiken in her arms. She felt like an army with banners.

Ethel's first fury of grief had spent itself and she sat leaning limply back, her eyes closed, breathing in long, quivering sighs.

"Look," cried Jane, "here's Billiken!"

Billiken flung herself at her mother with a lilting squeal of joy, and Ethel's eyes opened and narrowed with a cold and appraising scrutiny. Her hands twisted together in her lap; she seemed to be weighing and balancing. At length, with a little brooding cry, she caught the baby in her arms.

Michael Daragh smiled sunnily at Jane, but she had no instant to spare for him then. She pulled Ethel to her feet. "Come," she said, imperiously. "Come and bring Billiken!" She led her out of the room.

The matron and the Irishman followed them, wondering.

Jane was guiding the girl, her face buried against the baby's woolen cap. "Look!" she said again, at the door of the dim reception room.

Ethel halted on the threshold, peering through the gathering winter dusk. "Oh,—Jerry?" she gasped, uncertainly.

The young man from the Gent's Furnishings strode forward to meet her, his eyes on her blurred and swollen face. "Say, listen," he began, "say, listen—" Then his gaze dropped to the child in her arms and grew bleak, and Ethel shrank back and away from him, her eyes wide and terrified.

It seemed to Jane, standing there in the ugly hall of the Agnes Chatterton Home, between the sharp-visaged matron and the Irishman who looked like Botticelli's saint, as if all the love and pity in the world hung by a hair above the pit.

It was a new and unpleasing thing to Billiken, to find cold eyes upon her, level, unloving, hostile eyes, but she had an antidote. Gazing blithely back at him with the wide little grin which had earned her the name of "the God of Things as They Ought to Be," she held out her arms with a gurgling cry and flung herself at the young man with the gay cravat as she had flung herself at her mother two minutes before.

The hot color flooded his face, his freckles were drowned in a red sea, his flanging ears were crimson. Suddenly, gropingly, he reached out for them both, and got the two of them into his arms. "It'll be O.K.," he said, huskily, winking hard. "It'll be O.K.! Say, listen, I got it all figured out! They been wantin' me to go to the Rochester store anyway, and we don't know a livin' soul there!"

They went away, the other three, and left them there together, and there were two little dabs of color on the matron's high cheekbones and her sharp eyes looked oddly dim. "Well," she said, "well—I guess that's settled right enough. And I guess we've got you to thank for it, Miss Vail."

"We have, surely, God save you kindly," said Michael Daragh, and his face had what Jane called its stained-glass-window look.

She felt very flushed and humbled under their beaming approbation. "There's only her own courage to thank!" But she snatched up a bit of the despised decoration, her cheeks scarlet. "You know,—I'm so happy—so gorgeously, dizzily happy—I can hear that magenta-colored paper joy-bell ring a silvery chime!"



CHAPTER VIII

It was November when Jane made her exodus from the Vermont village and her entry into New York, and by early summer she had written and sold three one-act plays for vaudeville which yielded plump little weekly royalties and gave her a reputation quite out of proportion to her output and experience. They began to advertise her sketches as "different" and to build up a vogue. "So and So in a Jane Vail act," said a pretty billboard, and Rodney Harrison gave himself jocularly proud airs as her discoverer and sponsor.

"I see clearly," said Jane, "that I must call you my Fairy God-brother!"

"I do not seem to crave the brother effect," said Mr. Harrison deliberately, before he gave his attention to a hovering head waiter. He was distinctly what her village called "not a marrying man," but he was beginning to have his moments of meaningful look and word.

"Well, then," said Jane, after agreeing to alligator pear salad, "shall we say Fairy God-cousin? That's a gay and pleasing relationship without undue responsibilities. Will that do?"

"That will do for the present," said Mr. Harrison. He regarded her across the small table with perfectly apparent satisfaction. Nothing bucolic here; a dark and gypsy beauty which glowed and kindled beside the fainter types about them, a wholly modish smartness, an elusive something to which he could not put a name, which gave him always the sense of glad pursuit. There had been in his early attitude, as she had divined, just a trifle of the King and the Beggar Maid, the Town Mouse and the City Mouse, but that was gone now. She knew his New York very nearly as well as he did himself and with her increased activities had come decreased dependence on him. She was either so gayly busy or so busily gay that she was able to accept only one invitation in four, which made it very necessary to ask her early and often. He was a wary young man, Rodney Harrison, urban from head to heel; marriage had not entered into his calculations. Yet he was aware of his growing fondness and approval, his growing conviction that domesticity with Jane Vail need not of necessity be the curbing and cloying thing he had visioned.

It was May when he told her that his mother wanted to come to see her, and it was the following day that Jane wrote home to tell them she was coming to Vermont for the summer months. She wasn't quite ready for Rodney Harrison's mother to call on her; she wanted a little time and a little perspective, and she knew that the hour had struck for her to go back and put a firm if mournful period to the affair of Marty Wetherby. There had been constantly recurring scoldings by mail from Sarah Farraday and Nannie Slade Hunter, and, while he was the poorest and least articulate of correspondents, his stammering letters had still achieved a pathos of their own, and the thing was no longer to be shirked.

So she said good-by at the boarding house to Mrs. Hills and Emma Ellis and Michael Daragh and at the station to Rodney Harrison; and went back in smart triumph with a wardrobe trunk full of clever clothes and the latest shining model in typewriters.

They were out in force to meet her; her Aunt Lydia Vail, happily tearful and trembling; Nannie Slade Hunter and Edward R. with the amazingly enlarged and humanized Teddy-bear, in their new roadster; Sarah Farraday, a little thinner after her hard-driven winter of teaching; and Martin Wetherby, panting a little even in his thin summer suit, removing his handsome Panama to mop a steaming brow.

The first evening was all Miss Lydia's, save that Sarah was coming over later to stay the night, and again Jane sat in the rosewood and mahogany dining room, served by the middle-aged maid who did not know that there was a servant problem, and ate the reliable stock supper—the three slices of pink boiled ham on the ancient and honorable platter of blue willow pattern ware, the small pot of honey, the two kinds of preserves, the hot biscuit, the delicate cups of not-too-strong, uncolored Japan tea, the sugar cookies, the pale custard.

Miss Vail had missed her niece acutely, as she would have missed a lovely elm from the street or the silhouette of the mountain which she got from her bedroom window, but she had wanted the dear girl to be happy, and she clearly was happy, brimmingly, radiantly, and she had gone down to her twice for merry and bewildered little visits and had come thankfully home again.

She beamed at her now across the table and insisted, as of old, that she eat two of the three slices of pink ham shaved to a refined thinness, and then they went into the pretty parlor and visited cozily until the little spinster's head began to jerk forward in the pauses, and Sarah Farraday, who had waited conscientiously until nine o'clock, appeared. Then Miss Lydia went upstairs to take off her plump, snug things and slip into her flannelette nightdress—the nights were still what she called "pretty sharp," and get into bed and "read until she got sleepy."

"Hannah says she sneaks in every night and snaps off the light after she's sound asleep," said Sarah. "It's a mercy she doesn't have to use a lamp,—she'd have burnt the house down years ago."

"She 'doesn't sleep,'" said Jane, looking tenderly after her, plodding plumply up the stairs, "she 'just rests her eyes for a moment.' Sally, let's go up to my room and have a regular, old-time talk-fest!"

So they went up the narrow stairs with their arms entwined about each other and took off their dresses and slipped into kimonos and let down their hair, but they found a strange and baffling constraint.

"Sally, dear," Jane determinedly broke the spell, "what's the silly matter with us?"

The blonde music teacher's eyes filled up with her ready tears. "It's—you've been away so long, and we've drifted so far apart.... Your life—your wonderful life——"

"Now, Sarah Farraday," her friend pounced upon her, "after the miles upon miles of letters I've written you, do you dare to feel that you don't know as much about my life as I do? Viper-that-bites-the-hand-that-writes-to-it! Why, I could have done another playlet—two—in the time I've taken to tell you everything!"

"You've been marvelous about letters," Sarah admitted with a grateful sniff, "but——"

"And what's more—and this admits of no argument—next winter you're coming down to me for a month of giddy gamboling and to soak your soul in symphonies and operas!"

Sarah Farraday gave a little gasp and her thin cheeks flushed. "Oh, my dear, you're a lamb to think of it, but of course I couldn't. It's wonderful, just even to think about it, but it couldn't possibly happen."

"Why not?"

"Because," said Sarah, doggedly, "it's much too good to be true."

"Now that," said Jane sternly, "is a wicked and immoral remark! There is nothing too good to be true, and it's blasphemy to say so."

"Oh, well ... of course, with you—" She left her sentence trailing and let her thin hands fall in her lap limply, palm upward and stared at Jane. Her dark hair was shimmering and floating about her and her dark eyes were pools of light. "Janey," she leaned toward her and spoke wistfully, "are you really as impossibly happy as you look?"

"Happier," said Jane, promptly. She began to brush her dusky mane with long and sweeping strokes. "Still doing this a hundred and twenty times a night, Sally, no matter at what scandalous hour I come in."

But the other persisted with sudden sapience. "I mean, are you really as happy as you act, or are you just—gay?"

"Both," said Jane, stoutly. ("Sixty-two, sixty-three, sixty-four—) I've had a bright and shining time, work and play, with my feet very much on the earth,—or the pavements, rather. I'm satisfied, Sally."

"But oh," said Sarah, forlornly, "you said you wouldn't be really 'going away' from us, but you have! Millions of miles away—a whole world away, Jane! You've proved your point,—succeeded beyond our wildest dreams——"

"Not beyond my wildest dreams, old dear," said her best friend with happy impudence. "You were more modest for me than I was for myself!"

"—beyond our wildest dreams," Sarah repeated stubbornly, "and you can carry on your work just as well here, now, and wouldn't it be the loveliest, most natural thing in the world for you to stay at home? Jane—poor old Marty!" She ran to Jane and flung her arms emotionally about her.

"Sally, there's no more chance——"

But the other cut in, panic-stricken, "Oh,—don't make up your mind now—to-night! Wait! Just spend the summer in the dear old way, as we've always done, and see if you don't fit right into your old niche again, with—with——"

"With a steadily fattening Marty," said Jane, bright-cheeked, "and a hot, pink nursery with a fat and well-oiled Kewpie?"

"Jane," said Sarah coldly, "there are some things too sacred to——"

"To be anything but decently and sanely frank about," said Jane. "My child, the story isn't going to have that particular happy ending for which you pant. You see all my life in a proscribed pattern. Like a sentimental ballad's second verse ... back to the grassy meadows ... childhood's happy hours again.... Once again he sang—

"'For you are my li—hittel—sw—heet—heart.'"

"Then," said Sarah with conviction, "it's either the man-you-met-on-the-boat, or that Irish missionary person!"

Jane laughed. Wasn't it amazing how good old Sally, herself conceived for celibacy, yearned to mate up every one within her ken! Nature's little way of evening up, perhaps; if Sarah herself was to carry on the race chain, was she to make it up by tireless toil in urging others on? "Sally, Michael Daragh, as I've tried to make clear, is an over-soul. His large feet lug his large frame about on this terrestrial sphere, but in reality he isn't here at all. He is quite literally absent from the body and present with the Lord. As I told you before,—a large body of man entirely surrounded by conscience. No more aware of me, as a woman, than he is of Emma Ellis—and you don't get the force of that"—she grinned shamelessly—"unless you know Emma."

"Then, how about—the other one?"

Jane considered, picking and choosing her words as she loved to do. "Well, Michael feels I am too much of the world, Rodney that I am too little; Michael is above me, spiritually speaking, and Rodney is beneath—which would, of course, make him much the pleasanter person to live with! Rodney is thoroughly and comfortably this-worldly; Michael is—other-worldly! This is the truth of the matter, Sally; Rodney Harrison is keen about my neat little brain and Michael Daragh is gravely concerned about my soul, but I think neither one is interested in my heart!"

She sprang to her feet and threw a gorgeous robe about her. "Come along, Sally! Let's go down and make some chocolate! I've come to crave nocturnal nourishment, and much as I adore talking about myself I've really had enough of the topic for to-night. How many pupils have you now? And how near is the baby-grand?"

* * * * *

She stayed three months at home, tapping briskly at her typewriter in the mornings and giving her afternoons and evenings to the old innocuous routine, and it was said of her that she had changed and gotten citified, of course, but seemed very much interested in everything and everybody, and many were the placid hours in the pink nursery, the drives with the Edward R. Hunters in the new roadster, the teas in the burlapped studio with Sarah Farraday, the meetings of the Ladies' Aid and the Tuesday Club where she gave gay little talks and readings and vague old ladies asked her gently if she was still going on with her literary work.

The only radical change was Martin Wetherby, whose case came up for decision at once, in spite of the sage counsels of the Teddy-bear's father.

The second evening at home Miss Lydia Vail had risen flutteringly and left them alone on the porch in the soft dusk, and at once he had plunged to his doom. There was no serene confidence about him this time, no snatching her into a short-breathed embrace; he was rather pathetically humble before her new poise and achievements, pleading, desperate.

"Marty, dear," said Jane unhappily, "I don't want to be unsympathetic, but indeed I don't think I'm ruining your life! You're so nice and young, and you're doing famously at the bank! Oh, I know it's just because you've held to the idea for so long—and so many other people have, and made it seem—settled. It's just your habit—not your heart, that's aching!"

But in spite of this cheering reassurance she had to admit to Sarah that Marty continued to droop at the corners, and to have, in spite of the assistant cashiership, a look of shaken confidence. His mother, that former arranger of little gatherings for the young people and dispenser of light refreshments, treated Jane with coolness, and had her adherents here and there in the village.

Jane went back to New York the first of September and sold immediately the one-act play she had written during the summer, and was engulfed in the business of putting it on, and presently Rodney Harrison brought her a well-known actor from the legitimate who wanted to rest and make a corpulent salary in the two-a-day, and she succeeded in fitting him to a sketch. It brought her fresh laurels and a larger audience and a better royalty, and she told herself stoutly (as Rodney Harrison had first told her) that it didn't matter in the least that he wanted a good deal of broad and rather edgy comedy and, failing to get it from her, had put it in himself, and, therefore, had his name on the program as joint author. Every one would know that the clean and clever little story was her own and the edginess his. She took great pains to write this to Sarah and to repeat it often to herself and she glowed under Rodney Harrison's pride in her and the cordial respect of the booking offices and the dazzled admiration of the boarding house.

But one humid evening, when all the vigor and backbone seemed to have melted out of the world, Michael Daragh asked her to ride with him on the top of the bus to Grant's Tomb and walk back along the river, and presently they sat down on the damp grass like a shop girl and her gentleman friend and looked off across the river, shining in the moonlight, and after a silence Jane said pleasantly, with her new admixture of aloofness and indulgence, "Well, Michael Daragh, I know you haven't marched me here merely to revel in the beauty of the evening. It's more a case of—'thank you,' said the oysters, 'we've had a pleasant run!' You may as well begin. I'm feeling very peaceful and very prosperous. Who is the poor thing you're concerned with now?"

And the big Irishman, a dull flush mounting in his lean cheeks, faced her squarely. "The poor thing I'm concerned with now, God save you kindly, is yourself, Jane Vail!"

She hadn't any words in that first dazed moment. She sat staring at him, her great eyes wide.

"It's yourself, surely," he said, sternly, "the way you've wandered from the high road and lost yourself in a bog."

She was still too startled and bewildered to be angry. "I haven't the vaguest idea what you mean. Have you?"

"I have, indeed, Jane Vail. The thing you've just written and sold, now,—are you proud in your heart of it?"

"Certainly I am," she said stoutly, her voice beginning to warm with resentment. "It isn't a classic, of course, but it's a thoroughly workmanlike, snappy little act, sure to get over, and——"

He shook his head. "Lost in the bog you are, and sinking deeper every day."

"Sinking, my good Michael? If you'll read this week's Variety you'll find there are those who talk about my phenomenal rise! I loathe saying things like that about myself, but you make me do it, in decent self-defense. It's simply that you don't understand these things—that you're looking at them from the wrong angle." She talked on, angrily, defensively, but inwardly she was feeling attacked and abused and crushed. There had been nothing but praise and congratulation and rejoicing now for ten months, and this shabby settlement worker dared—"I'm sure you mean to be very kind," her voice was ice and velvet, "but I'm afraid you've got rather in the way of lecturing young women, haven't you? And I really think you might save your admonitions and exhortations for those who need and want them. Personally, I'm entirely satisfied with the way I'm getting on."

"'Getting on,' yes, God forgive you," he said mournfully, "and that's all you're doing, Jane Vail!"

"I consider you incapable of judging a matter like this," said Jane with cool disdain. "You see life always through a stained-glass window and it gives you distorted values. What do you mean,—only 'getting on'?"

"Wasn't it yourself told me what you said to your friend back in the village—that you were 'going on'? Woman dear," the purling brogue dropped an octave, "there's the wide world of difference between the two! 'Getting on' you are surely, the way your name screams from the billboards and your bank balance fattens like a stalled ox, but are you 'going on,' Jane Vail? Are you 'going on'? Woman, dear," the purling brogue—"the rare, high places you can climb if you will? Or will you stop content with the pavement, the likes of you that was made for the mountain peaks? Are you going on, I say? Answer me, Jane Vail!"

But instead, with flashing eyes and scorching cheeks she took leave of him, requesting him curtly not to follow, and walked alone to the Drive and hailed a bus, and sat staring darkly ahead of her as it jolted and swayed down the long blocks to Washington Square.

When Michael Daragh came down to breakfast next day he found the dining room in a state of excited conjecture. Miss Vail, dressed for a journey, had roused Mrs. Hills at six in the morning to say that she was going out of town for several weeks, and had immediately driven off in a taxi with her handbag and suitcase, her steamer trunk and her typewriter.



CHAPTER IX

Nevertheless, when Emma Ellis came in to luncheon, a little early, the third day following, she espied at Michael Daragh's place a letter with a Boston postmark, addressed in a firm, small hand she knew. She was the only person in the room and she had time to examine it thoroughly, even as to thickness, before Mrs. Hills came in. It happened that there were mail deliveries just before the three meal times and it was the boarding-house keeper's guileless custom to sort and distribute letters at the table, thus saving a wearisome climb and much pedestrianism through long halls.

"Well, I've got a line from Jane and I'm free to say I'm relieved. I was afraid she was sick or something, rushing off like that, rousing me out of a sound sleep at six in the morning, just saying she was going out of town. I supposed, of course, she was going home to her Aunt Lydia Vail."

"Didn't she?"

"No, she didn't." Mrs. Hills took the note out of her apron pocket and consulted it. "No, she's going to Maine. Foot'n alone. Says she needs quiet for some special work."

"Mr. Daragh has something from her, too." Emma Ellis stood behind the Irishman's chair, her pale eyes lapping up the inscription.

"No!" said Mrs. Hills, advancing with interest, frank and unashamed. "You don't say! Well, he has! Sure's you're a foot high! Well, now, that beats me!"

Emma Ellis tucked in her lips in a way she had before making a certain type of remark. "It is rather strange.... They were out walking in the evening, and in the morning she left, precipitately."

"'Tis kinder queer," Mrs. Hills clucked. "Couldn't have quarreled or anything—never paid enough attention to each other for that."

"Oh," said Emma Ellis in a hushed voice, "don't you think Miss Vail has always devoted a great deal of attention to Mr. Daragh?"

"Well, Jane's a great one to make up to folks and be friendly; always was, as a child. I can remember her, four years old, after her folks died and she came to live with Miss Lydia. Wasn't afraid of anything or anybody, ever. Used to slip out and run off down Main Street after a peddler or a gypsy or anybody she took a fancy to. But—" she came back into the present—"Mr. Daragh's been kinder queer these last two, three days. But then, far's that goes, he's always queer. Oddest mortal I ever met up with in all my born days. Odder'n Adam's off ox."

"If it is odd," said the Settlement worker, dull color flooding her sallow skin, "for a man to turn his back on greed and gain and devote his life to altruism——"

"Now, now," said the boarding-house keeper, pacifically, "you've no call to take me up like that. Land knows I set a great store by Mr. Daragh, if he is Irish as the pigs. Never had a human being under my roof that was easier to suit and made less fuss, but he's queer and I'd say it on my dying bed!"

The other woman stood looking down at Jane Vail's pretty letter which managed, in spite of the plain, creamy envelope and the many alien hands through which it had passed, to retain a startling individuality, and she spoke in the little smothered voice which was her proclamation of intense feeling. "If—she—with the life she leads—has—has disturbed Mr. Daragh——"

"Now, then, you look here," said the Vermont villager with sudden sharpness, "I guess her life is about as important as anybody else's I might name! I guess if Mr. Daragh's 'disturbed,' as you call it, it's no worse for him than it's been for others. My land, Jane Vail could of had her choice of the town, where she comes from. There's four wanted her, to my certain knowledge, and they say Martin Wetherby (Wetherby Ridge is named for his family—they go back to Revolutionary days) never will get over it. And I guess that Mr. Harrison that rolls up here in taxis and limousines is sitting up and taking notice, sure's gun's iron! And if Mr. Michael Daragh——"

"Sh ..." said Emma Ellis.

The big Irishman came into the room, graver even than usual, but his eyes lighted warmly at sight of the missive at his place. He nodded to the watching women, tore it open and read it swiftly, and as he read the gladness spread and deepened in his face.

"I had a letter from Jane, too," said Mrs. Hills, seating herself. "Going to Maine for some special work she's got to do."

"Yes," said Michael Daragh. "Special work, indeed." He folded the letter and put it back in his pocket, and the table filled up with the other members of the household, the music students and the school teachers and the elderly concert-going ladies in their staid silks ... all the sound and sensible persons whom the missing boarder made so drab and colorless by her glowing presence. He smiled sunnily at Emma Ellis and was astonished to see tears in her light eyes, but he was used to tears and woes and secret sorrows, so he smiled again and more convincingly and went sturdily on with his meal. When he was alone in his bare and austere room on the top floor he took out Jane's letter and read it again, slowly and with thankful care.

I've decided to forgive you, Michael Daragh, it began, but it takes a bit of doing! It's easy enough to forgive any one for being in the wrong; that's a really pleasant and soothing sensation; but to pardon you for being in the right—that's taken me all these hours! I said that you always saw life through a stained-glass window and that it gave you distorted values, didn't I? That was temper, pure and simple. You were perfectly right to wail like one of your own Banshees because the likes of me—once content when the pale shadow of Pegasus passed her by—is become an ink-spattered, carbon-grimed gold digger! Ten months ago, shivering and quivering over "ONE CROWDED HOUR," I cowered back in my semi-occasional taxicab and watched the meter with a creeping scalp.... Now I can ride from Yonkers to the Square and admire the scenery all the way. But this isn't what I intended to do. It's been warm, human, jolly sort of work, knitting up the spatted broker in the box to the newsboy in the gallery and I've adored it, but I've lost my way, Michael Daragh. It isn't what I intended to do; it isn't what I intended to be; the dew is drying on my dreams and my soul shrieks S.O.S.!

For the first time in my snug, smug life I've had large chunks of truth told me; I didn't like it. I don't enjoy it even yet, but I've arrived at the decent stage of gratitude, Michael Daragh. Thank you—and good-by. Shall I send you bulletins of my pilgrim progress? I'm off to a lean, clean island in Maine, to live on eight dollars a week and snare back the thing I lost.

JANE VAIL.

Thereafter, Mrs. Hills and Emma Ellis were to see and to marvel over the creamy buff envelopes which came to the Irishman, now thin, now thick, postmarked in Maine, often only two or three days apart, never less frequently than once a week. The boarding-house keeper had her own pleasant little note, occasionally, and Emma Ellis had three conscientious picture postcards, but it was to Michael Daragh that the letters came in a steady stream.

"Mark my words," said Mrs. Hills, "there's nothing in it. My land, he's as offhand about 'em as if they were circulars, and I don't believe he answers one in six."

"Yet she continues to write him constantly," said Emma Ellis.

"Well, if she does, it's her business, that's all I've got to say," said the older woman, dangerously. "Jane Vail never ran after anybody yet and I don't believe she's going to begin now. He says—and she says—she's doing some special work, and I suppose maybe he's advising her about it."

"I've never understood before that Mr. Daragh was a literary authority," said the Settlement worker in her little, smothered voice.

"Well, I'm free to say it beats me. But all I know is, Jane Vail's nobody's fool."

And Michael Daragh, meanwhile, read his letters in his room, monklike in its simplicity, three times, and then he tore them up, quickly, the line of his lean jaw salient. The second one to come had been dated at six in the morning, on the wharf at Bath, and ran—

I'm shivering, Michael Daragh,—shivering in September! The incredible freshness of this morning, the bracing miracle of cold! I left Boston on the night boat and the stewardess rapped me firmly up at three-thirty to see the sun rise. I stayed stubbornly in my berth, at first, but presently a length of Quaker gray sky interlined with faintest rose brought me to my elbow and then to the window. The little steamer was feeling her cautious way up a river of dull silver between banks of taupe and mauve. After a moment I could pick up objects here and there in somber silhouette—a windmill, a battered barn, crude landings reaching out to graze the boat. In that tremulous moment before the break of day, shore and stream and sky melted and ran together in the liquid pattern of an abalone shell. Then, suddenly, the sun shot up over the rim of the world, "out of the gates of the day," a clear persimmon, gorgeous as a Chinese lantern, and the realm of faery warmed into reality,—river and river banks, houses and little hummocky hills.

I must walk now to keep warm. There is a young old woman in shabby corduroy footing it briskly to and fro, who may be going to take my toy steamer,—tossing a mane of smoke and champing its bit at the upper wharf—and I'm going to speak to her.

7 A.M. Going up the River.

She was taking the down boat, but she gave her valuable experience to me. She asked me for which island I was heading, and when I said I didn't know,—that I meant to line them up and say,—"My-mother-told-me-to-take-this,—" she said,—"Oh, then do take Three Meadows!" She has been there all summer, and she thinks I can board at the same place—with Angelique Larideau Gillespie, "Mis' Deac'n Gillespie." She is Canadian-French and the only woman on the island who can cook any other way than frying. The bad little hotel is closing. She was so merry and footloose and free, Michael! That's exactly the sort of old maid I mean to be——

"Love of roving foot and joy of roving eye——"

We have been wriggling up a cunning little river, bumping into clumsy landings here and there and now the porter-purser-steward- newsagent-cabin-boy-and-guide says the next one is mine.

Wish me luck, Michael Daragh!

J. V.

Three Meadows, Maine, Friday Afternoon.

It would be tea time anywhere else, Michael Daragh, but it gives no tea here. Eating between meals is deplored and is referred to as "piecing." Will you ask Mrs. Hills to express my tea basket and two cups?

This is a lamb of an island. The land lifts away to low hills and the village has splashed a little way up on the sides. A curtain of filmy fog has just risen clear of the treetops and everything is graciously gray. No one ever comes so late in the season and this awful, little hotel is closing,—it ought to be closed and sealed forever. Everything about the tiny town is refreshing. A citizen finished up a game of checkers before he went down to consider the case of my trunk. Then it took him some time to wake up his horse, which did a bewildered Lady Macbeth up the street. I was walking beside, and suddenly a roly-poly puppy slipped away from a boy and ran straight under the clumsy hoofs.... You never heard such ki-yi's. You'd think he was being vivisected. There was a shrieking streak of white and he disappeared under a culvert. The old mare stopped, wide-awake and horror-stricken, and the boy—a pitiful little person with his head held tautly back, almost a hunchback—and the driver and I flew to the spot and all the village Hectors laid their helmets by and gave themselves to the hour. The sweetest old man in rusty black laid right down flat on his stomach and peeked into the dusty tunnel, calling, "Come, pup! Come, pup! Come, dear!" But the yammerings went on.

Finally the blacksmith next door put down a pink horseshoe and came out. I'm much obliged for blacksmiths nowadays, aren't you, Michael Daragh? I love their leaping fires and their worn, leather aprons and their dim, rich Flemish interiors,—in our soft world of push buttons.

This one said, "Was they a string around his neck, Dan'l?" Then he went back into his shop and returned with a long stick with a bent nail in the end and began to fish absorbedly into the culvert. Presently a wild crescendo of shrieks announced his catch. I shut my eyes and covered my ears and when I looked again he was hauling out a quivering lump of baby dog. He felt him all over with grimy, gentle fingers and "allowed they warn't nothin' broke ... just skairt him outer a year's growth," handed him back to the boy and went again to his horseshoe. The people pressed close with little clucks of sympathy and made the nicest fuss about it, and the boy turned out to be Daniel Gillespie and I went right on home with him and arranged to move there to-morrow—his mother desiring a day in which to "red up" for me. I wanted to go at once—I'm so afraid this hotel might close with a snap, with me on the inside. At noon to-day I did not crave any of the ready-to-wear effects on the zebra menu card and asked the aloof young lady under the pompadour how long the chops would take. "'Bout fifteen minutes." "Very well, then," I said, "I'll take the chops." "Ain't any."

Don't you adore that, Michael Daragh?

The Next Friday, At Deacon Gillespie's.

The top of the morning to you, Michael Daragh! Here in the rich cream of the day we're waiting for the mail, Dan'l and I and the pup. Guess where? In the graveyard, and I'm sitting on a tumbled-over tombstone. I wish I could make you see this spot. I've always hated cemeteries, the sleek, prosperous, well-fed, well-groomed sort, but this is indeed God's Acre. You step over the broken stones of the wall into a land of gracious gray; gray stone and moss, gray sky and feathery fog. Twice only in my vista a note of color—a low-growing lobelia, intensely blue against the foot of a new grave, and further on a brave geranium, flaunting the scarlet flag of defiance at death; for the rest, the quiet gray of peace and permanence. Involuntarily, one treads softly, as in a room with sleepers ... sleepers of a long, soft sleep ... who have laid them thankfully down to rest and left no call!

I hear the klip-klup of Lizzie, the postman's horse, so I can't tell you about the Gillespies until next letter.

Dear M.D., I'm growing so nice you wouldn't know me for the frenzied vaude-villain of a fortnight past. Some of the old cells in my brains are coming to life again. Thanks, Michael Daragh! Do you know what M.D. stands for?—Do-er of Miracles. Isn't it pretty much of a miracle to make me turn my back on five orders and bring my soul up here to renovate it?

J. V.

Tuesday.

Michael Daragh, I'm up in my cunning little room with its heaving ceiling and its braided mats and patchwork quilt, and I can look down on the corner of the graveyard and see Dan'l and his dog waiting for Uncle Robert. He is not a real postman but he drives down for his own mail every day and "stops by" with the Gillespies'. (Not that they ever have any!) He's the old man who got down on his rusty black stomach to peek into the culvert and call "Come, pup, come, dear!" He's the sweetest old thing with Dan'l. The child lives in constant hope of a letter, and every day Uncle Robert (he's everybody's uncle) says, "Wall, not to-day, Dan'l!" And then Dan'l and the pup trot home.

Dan'l is the most appealing child! I've always fancied the freckles and splinters and grime and cheek type of little boy, but Dan'l gets into your heart, some way. He makes me think of Andrea del Sarto's young St. John in the Wilderness, for he has, in addition to the unearthly sweetness in his eyes, a warmth of coloring at variance with the drained fairness of these islanders. His Canadian mother explains that,—"her that was Angerleek Larrydoo," as the neighbors say, and that just expresses it. She was—but she isn't any more. She's just the Deacon's "woman." (That is his own gallant phrase: "I guess likely my woman'll cal'late she c'n do fer y'u," he said when I asked for board.)

She has a sort of petrified prettiness, the ghost of girlhood in a face furrowed and sagging with fretted years. Age and unhappiness have hardened about the sweetness of long ago—like a rose imbedded in ice at a country fair.

And the Deacon! I didn't know it gave his like, in these lax days. He has a beautifully chiseled old face with an eagle beak and ice-blue eyes, and he looks as if his favorite winter sport were Turning Erring Daughters Out into the Snow.

Dan'l is the only child at home now and they both adore him,—the mother with timid tenderness and the old man with fierce repression. Even the pup takes on character from the family. I call it Sweet-Alice-Ben-Bolt, because it very nearly weeps with delight when you give it a smile and trembles with fear at your frown. The Deacon is of that large and austere order of persons who "like dogs, in their place"; S.A.B.B. wears his stumpy, little tail at half mast whenever the head of the house is near.

There is some mystery about Dan'l's watching for a letter. His mother yearns over him and says,—"But, maybe to-morrow, Dannie!" but his father sneers, and then the child seems to shrivel before my eyes.

I wish I could slip some silver-gray fog in this letter, to rub on your burning brow!

J. V.

Some Day in October.

My days slip by like pearl-gray beads on a rosary, Michael Daragh. I honestly haven't an idea of the date. But I know Dan'l's story. We were sitting on the toppled-over tombstone of a sturdy old patriarch who had buried four wives, just after the postman went by one day, and the child said, defensively, as if in answer to my thought——

"But I did get a letter, once!"

I kept mouse-still, and he told me. Last summer there came to Three Meadows a lazy, charming, gypsy sort of fellow from nowhere, stony broke, to whom the Deacon gave work for his board. Out of Danny's clipped phrases I could build up the rogue's personality,—the gay, lavish, careless, happy-go-lucky-ness which warmed the cockles of the little lad's hungry heart.

He was here four months, and then a pal wrote him he could get him a job as handy man with a small circus then in Vermont. But Dan'l's beloved vagabond hadn't a sou, and before he could tramp there, the show would be far on its southern way. Naturally, the Deacon refused a loan—I can just see the way his mouth would snap shut like a trap, but Dan'l, what with egg money and his tiny garden, and errand money from summer boarders, had gathered together twenty slow dollars, and he came lavishly forward. The rover blithely promised to pay him back in two monthly payments. He's never sent a penny. He wrote once; Danny showed me the letter, worn with many rapt readings,—a silly, flowing hand which looks as if it had been done up in curl papers over night—and explained that he'd been sick, and had to buy clothes, but next month, sure! And Dan'l was a sport and true blue and a little old pal, and he'd never forget him.

Dan'l's "bein' so puny" saved him the whole brunt of his father's rage, but this sneering scorn has been harder to bear,—and the amazing part of it is that the boy doesn't really care about the money,—lean little Islander though he is. That is merely the symbol of his friend's good faith. "Ef only he'd jest write 'n tell me things," he sighed, "th' money c'd wait. He needs it worse'n I do."

Meanwhile, with eternal-springing hope in his little flat chest he trots down to the graveyard corner every day, and every day Uncle Robert says, with a cheery chirp in italics, "Wall, not to-day, Dan'l!"

The child is getting thinner and paler, now the sharp weather is coming. His father wrote a laborious letter by the lamp, one evening, and a week later a good gruff old doctor came over from the mainland and chaffed Danny about his pup and told him to play in the sun and drink plenty of milk and not to fret about school this year. I waylaid him privately and asked if there was anything I could get or do—a tonic, a change. He patted my shoulder and said, "Land t'goodness, no! That youngun's been a-dying ever since I borned him, fourteen years ago. He warn't meant for old bones."

Oh, Michael Daragh, I can't stand it—poor little Daniel in a Lion's Den of broken faith, and scorn, and creeping death! What can I do?

J. V.



CHAPTER X

But it was well into October before the Irishman got the letter which he had been waiting for—the one which sent the color mounting gladly in his lean cheeks. It was not long, but it fairly sang with jubilance and the feel of it in his hand was warm.

On a Gold and Scarlet Afternoon.

Michael Daragh, I'm at work! Steadily, sanely, surely, at work again!

Long ago, before I began to run after strange gods, I got a story back from the New England Monthly—that Dean of Magazines in her sober brown frock with no jewels or adornments at all,—with a quite wonderful personal note. If I had followed it up, I do believe I'd have landed on that stern and rock-bound coast, but I went over to the flesh pots instead. Now I have made a stern and rock-bound compact with myself. I'm not coming back to New York, and you are not to write me a line, until I've written a tale that brown-gowned magazine will take. "Where there is no vision, the people perish," the Deacon thundered, at a meeting. I was very near to perishing, when you scolded me awake, Michael Daragh, M.D., Miracle Do-er, God save you kindly!

That vaudeville work—and I shall do more of it, some day—was like a fast and furious game of tennis under a scorching sun; now I'm delving in a dim, cool library.

I'm going to be as patient as a locust bridge-builder. I know that flocks of long envelopes are coming back, bringing their tales behind them, but one day I shall hear a jubilant note in the klip-klup of Lizzie's hoofs and Uncle Robert will hand me an envelope of bewitching smallness, with a tiny typed letter inside.... "It is with very great pleasure...."

Until that day break, and the shadows flee away——

J. V.

It was Michael Daragh's custom to read these letters three times, carefully, and then to tear them in pieces which would be annoyingly and impossibly small to the chambermaid, and to throw them into his waste-paper basket, but this time, after his third perusal, instead of destroying it he put it away in his worn leather wallet. "I'll be keeping it, just, till the next one comes," he told himself, silently, "so I can be comparing the way she's coming on—God love her."

But the next letter to come and several following held no mention of her task. It was as if she had opened the heart of her mind further than she meant to do, and was shyly standing in front of it, now, talking of things remote and removed.

Friday Morning.

I've found a way to make Dan'l happy, M.D. I was reading to him last night, and suddenly he said in his shy, repressed way, "Was you ever to a circus?" I started to say that they bored me to the bone, even in infancy, but I happened to glance up and see his eyes. He's been following his beloved vagabond about in his heart, you see. So I tried to create a circus for him—the round rag rug was the sawdust ring, the steaming kettle was the calliope, wheezing a strident song about a wooden leg, and out of thin air came the haughty ringmaster and the clown and the pink acrobats, and I remembered thankfully that I'd memorized Vachel Lindsey's "Kallyope" long ago——

"Tooting joy, tooting hope, I am the Kallyope! Hoot, toot, hoot, toot, Willy, willy wah hoo, Sizz—fizz——"

Dan'l held his breath, his eyes starry, and his mother stopped her work, and I could see that the old man was listening slyly. Do you know it, Michael? It's pure witchcraft of words.

"See the flags; snow-white tent; See the bear and elephant; See the monkey jump the rope; Listen to the lion roar, LISTEN TO THE LION ROAR! Listen to the Kallyope, Kallyope, Kallyope!"

(He must have been thinking of the Deacon's sort:)

"I will blow the proud folk low, Humanize the dour and slow, I will shake the proud folk down——"

Dan'l went to sleep pink and happy. So did I!

J. V.

Wednesday.

I haven't told you about the "Low-down Wilkes," have I? They're the pleasantest people in Three Meadows and we're very clubby. The nice old maid on the wharf at Bath told me about them and advised me to have the woman do my washing, but warned me that I should have to come unto her delicately, like Agag. Being the poorest and most destitute family on the Island they are correspondingly proud and "techy."

Shiftlessness is a fine art with them, they've carried it so far. Last winter they lived in a very good two-story house, and as it was a very bitter season and Mr. L.D.W. was "kinder run down, someway," he very ingeniously burnt it for fuel while they were living in it,—first the partitions in the second story, then the floor, then the stairs, then the downstairs walls and doors. Wasn't that clever of him? Now it's just a charred shell, and—grace of a more opulent relative—they are camping in an unused barn. They fish a little, and pick blueberries, and wonder, vaguely, "jest how they'll make out, come wintuh."

I wish you might have seen her when, after a long social call, I subtly introduced the subject of laundry and dilated on my helpless predicament. She weighed and considered and consulted with her spouse, and said at last, "Wall, I don't keer if I do—but I wunt fetch'n kerry fer nobuddy!" Since when I have myself fetched and carried my garments, and they are rapidly taking on the tinge of prevailing Island grayness. The L.D.W.'s are gentle and gay, and they love Dan'l and "Angerleek" even if she is "a furriner," and they sigh that the Deacon is "a good man, but ha'ad." His severity has driven all the older children away from home, two of them girls. (Wasn't I right about the Erring Daughters and the Snow?)

I asked Mrs. L.D.W. if I might bestow upon her a tailored suit which has almost worn me out. She hesitated, shifted the 1920 model in Low-Down Wilkes to the other hip (babies are their only lavish luxury!) and allowed she didn't mind, if I was a mind to fetch it down to the graveyard corner some night after dusk. Every human being in Three Meadows has seen me wear it and could describe it to the last stitch and button, and every one will know where she got it. Nevertheless, in a world of foot-lickers, isn't pride like that delicious?

I did for myself when I started that indoor circus effect; sentenced to be Scheherazade! Lady chariot drivers and spotted clowns and strange beasts swarm through the prim, gray farmhouse. Dan'l has stayed in bed for two days, and Uncle Robert's chirp is growing husky.

Between circus performances I'm working like a riverful of beavers. The best story I've ever written is almost ready to launch.

J. V.

Tuesday.

DEAR MICHAEL DARAGH, I can't bear it about Dan'l! I don't mean about his going,—the old doctor is right about that, but oh, that wretched rover! Dan'l makes loyal excuses for him—he must be sick again or out of work or too busy; the flame of his faith never burns dim.

This morning I went to the Deacon. "Look here," I said, "that fellow will never pay up and Dan'l is breaking his heart." He nodded. "Well," I went on, "I mean to make up a letter and put in twenty dollars and send it to a friend of mine in New York to mail back to Dan'l."

His eagle eye grew bleak. "Falsehood and forgery!" he thundered. "I'm a plain man, sinful, Adam's seed as we all are, but I never yet soiled my lips with a lie."

"Oh, you needn't bother about it at all," I assured him. "I'll do the whole thing. You see, my lips aren't so immaculate, or so fussy!"

"I wunt act a lie, neither," he said.

I could feel myself generating temper, and it was a relief for it deadened my grief over Dan'l to be fine and mad at his father. I looked him straight in his ice-blue eye. "Just what do you mean by that, Mr. Gillespie?"

"I wunt have the boy deceived. Ain't no peace comin' from a lie! Land t' goodness," he regarded me mournfully, "don't we have to strive night an' day, 'thout takin' any extry sins on our souls?"

"Why, no, Deacon Gillespie," I told him sweetly, "I don't have a bit of trouble being good. It just seems to come naturally to me!"

I know he yearned to box my ears. Instead, he roared, "We are as prone to evil as the sparks to fly upward!"

"You may be," I said. "I shouldn't wonder at all if you are. But as for me, I'm not a miserable sinner and I never was. I shouldn't know an evil impulse if I met it in my mush bowl!" Then I left him, purple with scandalized rage, and found Angelique and told her my pretty plan. Oh, Michael, if you could have seen the poor thing! Her knees fairly gave way under her and she sank into a chair and put her apron over her head. I said, "I thought if you were willing, perhaps the Deacon—" but she cried out, "No, no! One time the oldes' boy, Lem," she still has a bit of the soft habitant accent, "he do something bad, an' I tell a lie, so hees father shall not beat heem. By and by, he fin' out ..." she shut her eyes and shivered. "Heem he beat twice as hard ... me, he nevair believe again, all these years...."

Michael Daragh, I hate the Deacon. I know you consider hate the lowest form of human activity, but I hate the Deacon with a husky, hearty, healthy hate and it has a tonic effect which I'm sure must be good for me. I feed my fancy on boiling him in oil.

Gibbering with perfectly proper rage,

J. V.

The next note which came to the Irishman was only a line in length and a coolly typed line, but even so the letters seemed fairly to sing and to dance——

The story is done. It is good, Michael Daragh.

The letter which followed it went back to the human concerns about her.

Friday.

I'm sitting on the gravestone of the four-time widower, M.D., my sweater turned up about my ears, my fingers navy blue, my nose magenta. The world is bleak and bare, indoors and out. Dan'l grows hourly weaker, but he brightens at mail time, and grins his gallant little grin at disappointment. "But he will," he stoutly whispers.

Gentle old Uncle Robert grows fierce. "Ef I had that varmint here, I vum I c'd wring his neck!"

I'm sorry to report that I am not getting on very well with hating the Deacon. (Of course, you've kept the intervening air quivering with your admonitory wirelesses!) He is suffering so hideously, and so determinedly, like a fakir. He feels he must speed the parting soul with the Scriptures and he reads terrifying things about weird beasts,—lion-mouthed leopards with feet like bears—and when he goes downstairs I try—very clumsily, M.D.—to tell Dan'l about the God you know, the one who goes with you into dark alleys and dark hearts. I wish you were here to do it.

Dan'l's faith is indeed the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen, but I want to put a warm, tangible lie into his thin little claws before he goes.... Uncle Robert has "been an' went" since I began this letter, and again I must go up to Dan'l and tell him "Not to-day."

I'm a coward, M.D. I've never seen death so close before, and I want to run away. But I won't.

J. V.

P.S. I called on the Low Down Wilkes this morning. Mrs. L.D.W. was wearing my suit over a wrapper of faded red calico, but there was nothing in her manner to indicate that I had ever seen it before.

Saturday.

Here is my story, Michael Daragh, and it is your story, too, for you shamed me into doing it. I am sending it off to the brown-gowned monthly on the stern and rock-bound coast, and this carbon to you. Now will you write and tell me if you like it? Honestly! (I know I said I didn't want you to write me until I had landed a story there, but all this grief and grimness brings a sense of bleak loneliness, and if you think I've won back what I've lost, if you think I've found the vision which will keep my soul from perishing, tell me so.)

J. V.

Sunday Night.

I've been making circus all day, M.D.——

"Tooting joy, tooting hope, Willy wully wah hoo ... I am the golden dream, Singing science, singing steam— Listen to the lion roar—"

I've roared myself hoarse but I got him to sleep at last. I have figured it out and I see that I can't hear from either you or the Monthly before Wednesday at the earliest, and I won't let myself really look for anything before Friday.

J. V.

Again there came a single line——

Monday Night.

It's too heart-breaking to write about, M.D., even to you.

Tuesday Morning.

I've had to stop hating the poor old Deacon altogether; this morning he carried S.A.B.B. upstairs with his own hands and put him on the bed beside the boy.

J. V.

Tuesday Night.

It's very late, Michael Daragh, but there are things I must tell you before I sleep.

I went for a walk this morning, and when I came back I saw Angelique waving to me from the window. I knew, and I ran into the house and upstairs. The Deacon was praying aloud, a terrible, cast-iron prayer, and Angelique was sobbing and S.A.B.B. was whining and shivering. I knelt down beside Dan'l and he opened his eyes. I could just make out the whisper—"My ... letter?"

I jumped up and ran over to his father and took him by the elbow and marched him into my room and shut the door and stood with my back against it. My teeth were chattering so I could hardly speak. "He's dying," I said. "Now will you let me?"

He was shaking, too, but he quavered, "I wunt bear false witness! I wunt take a lie on my soul!"

Then something boiled up and over in my heart, Michael Daragh. I caught hold of him and shook him and I was so strong I scared myself. "You pitiful, craven-hearted old coward," I said, "all you can think of is your sour old self! If you loved him—if you knew the first faint beginning of love—" I snatched up the letter I had addressed to Dan'l and ran over to the dresser for my purse. "You stay in here with the truth and keep your musty little soul safe! I'm going in there and tell him a beautiful lie!"

But he fumbled some bills from his lean old wallet. "Wait! Here's twenty dollars! I'm a-comin', too!"

We went in together, and he bent over the bed and held the bills close to the boy's eyes. "Look a-here, Dan'l! Look a-here, boy! Here's your money! Here's your money, Dan'l!" (Wasn't it pitiful, Michael? Even then, he still thought the money meant most.)

Dan'l opened his eyes and I said, "You were right all along, Danny! You were right to trust and believe in him! He was grateful!"—and I held the envelope where he could see it,—the one I had addressed in a silly, flowing screed.

His pinched little face lighted up from within—cheerily, exquisitely, and his chin went up the tiniest fraction in glad pride. "I ... knew ..." He just barely breathed it, Michael, and then he sort of relaxed all over and gave a long, comfortable sigh, like a tired puppy, and—and went to sleep.

His mother screamed and fell down beside the bed, and the Deacon said, "Loose him an' let him go, Angerleek!"—but he lifted her up and kept his arms around her.

I went away and left them there with Dan'l and S.A.B.B. I had forgotten all about mail time, but I found myself presently at the graveyard corner. It was one of those gentle, warmed-over summer days and the air was mild and filled with little whispers. I was so happy, Michael Daragh, that in my heart I heard the "harpers harping with their harps," but by and by I was aware of a nearer, more intimate sound—not "klip-klup" as on other days, but klipety-klipety-KLIPETY—a panic of frantic speed.

Down the road they came, Old Lizzie's hoofs scattering dust and pebbles, Uncle Robert leaning far forward, laying on the lash. When he saw me he cried out:—"Oh, it ain't too late? Oh, my dear Lord'n Saviour, it ain't too late?"

Then he handed me a plump registered letter, addressed in a foolish, flowing screed which looked as if it had been done up in curl papers over night, and I began to cry for the first time.

"No," I said, "oh, no, it's not too late!" And I ran up to Dan'l's still little room and gave it to the Deacon and he took it with a great wonder in his ice-blue eyes and slipped it under the cold little claw, beside our merciful lie.

Then I went into my own room, and I noticed for the first time that Uncle Robert had given me two other letters and I stopped crying and stared at them.

One was a very small envelope and the name printed in the corner was that of the brown-gowned magazine on the stern and rock-bound. The other was yours.

J. V.

P.S. Guess which one I opened first, Michael Daragh, Do-er of Miracles?



CHAPTER XI

Jane stayed on at Three Meadows until after the bleak and austere little funeral, and long enough to help Angelique soften the harshly new grave with flowers and sturdily started plants, and stopped over at Bath and ordered a quaintly simple headstone which would be the Gillespie's pride and solace.

She was very happy on her return journey to New York,—in vastly different mood than the one of nine weeks before. Michael Daragh had written her a brief and beautiful letter, a letter she would always keep, as soon as he had read her story, and the thought of it warmed her like a summer sun, but as she went down the twisting silver river she had a vexed feeling that her postscript had been a bit of foolishness. "Guess which one I opened first, Michael Daragh, Do-er of Miracles?" Their relationship had shifted in these long weeks; ever since the evening on Riverside Drive when he had sternly recalled her to herself, they had gone by leaps and bounds, by hedge and byway, into a deeper and more intimate friendship, and yet, she told herself, that added line at the end of her letter to him was a High School girlish thing to have done; it presupposed something between them which wasn't there at all. She had flung it in without weighing it; she had honestly meant at the moment, that his approval of her new and serious story was more precious to her even than the editor's, but ... would Michael Daragh understand it that way?

She did not write him the exact time of her arrival, and it was the merest chance that she found him starting up the steps as her taxicab drew up at Mrs. Hills' door. They went up together and at his first hearty look and word she was able to laugh at herself for having worried an instant.

"It's rare and fine to have you back, Jane Vail," he said, glowing with gladness. "And you were good indeed to be sending me the long story letters all the while. 'Twas like a journey itself, the way I'd be following you up and down on that Island with all the queer folk and sad, and waiting at the graveyard corner for the mail!"

Jane glowed in return. "It's good to be back, Michael Daragh." (The nice, sane, sensible, dependable creature that he was! What a solid comfort it was to have him! This was exactly the way she wanted him to act and to feel and to be, and she wasn't—she was at some pains to assure herself—in the very least feeling vaguely disappointed or let down by his attitude.) "But it was the best time I ever had,—best in the sense of being the best for me." Generously and sweetly she gave him his due. "I'm still thanking you, you know, M.D.!"

He nodded gravely. "You've found your way back to the highroad in that tale you were sending me. I'm doubting you'll ever lose it again all the long days of your life."

"I won't" said Jane, stoutly. (Good to be back with him, good to hear his purling brogue and his lyrical construction. He talked like an old song.) The door of the boarding-house opened at their ring and Jane hurried in. "Here's Mrs. Hills! Hello, Mrs. Hills! Here I am!" She embraced the ex-villager warmly and espied Emma Ellis in the shadows of the hall, over her shoulder. "And Miss Ellis! How-do-you-do?"

Miss Ellis did very well, according to her own statement, but it was pathetically clear to one pair of sharp eyes at least that she would have done better if Michael Daragh had not been bringing in Jane's suitcase and handbag and umbrella while a taxi got under way in the street.

"It's so nice to be back with you all," said the returned exile, heartily. The Settlement worker came out into the light and it was to be observed that she was still more pinched and sallow than of yore and Jane's heart melted within her to swift mercy. "I found Michael Daragh on the sidewalk and pressed him into service as porter. Thanks, Michael Daragh. Am I to give you the quarter for your Poor and Needy?"

"You are, indeed," said the Irishman, firmly, taking the stairs two at a bound. "More than that, you'll be giving me for a case I know, with the proud and prosperous look you have on you this day!"

"I hope," said Emma Ellis, conscientiously, the taut lines of her face loosening a little, "you had a pleasant outing?"

"Yes," said Jane, flippantly, "but my outing was an inning—and I've delved like a riverful of beavers, and I'll be at work at nine to-morrow morning."

"That Mr. Harrison has been 'phoning and 'phoning," Mrs. Hills announced, complacently. "And he wants you should ring him up the minute you got in—something about this evening, I guess, he was so set on having you get the message."

"That listens alluringly! I'll call him now,—may I?" She shook herself out of her topcoat and fur and sat down at the hall telephone. Mrs. Hills and Miss Ellis discreetly withdrew to the living room, but the low tones of her voice were carrying and it was presently made clear to them that gayety was afoot for the evening, a sort of gayety they two had never known, would never know ... little tables with shaded candles, lights, music, subtle, wheedling music, hovering head-waiters ... the newest play ... then more little tables, more wheedling, coaxing music, more hovering head-waiters, dancing.... The boarding-house keeper told herself, comfortably, that it would never do for her, and pushed a tolerant curiosity back into the ragbag of her mind, and the Settlement worker tucked in her lips and reminded herself that there would be undernourished children, hungry children, not a mile from where Miss Vail would be eating out-of-season delicacies, and thanked her God that she was not as other women.

Michael Daragh came into the room an instant before Jane did. She was flushed and bright-eyed and smiling. "Well! I'll have to fly! I won't be here for dinner, Mrs. Hills,—I'm sorry, but it seems this is a rather special party to-night."

"It's your kind of clam chowder, too," said Mrs. Hills, shaking her head.

"Oh, what a shame! But save mine for tomorrow's lunch,—I adore it warmed over! Here, Michael Daragh"—she opened her brown, beaded bag with its high lights of orange and gold—"catch!" She tossed the little suede purse to him. "That's exactly the way I feel to-night, scattering largess to the multitude, regally pitching purses about! Take what you want—all you want—for that case! I must fly!" She looked at her wrist watch. "Mrs. Hills, will you let Mabel come and do me up in twenty minutes? See you all at breakfast!" She ran out of the room and they heard her swift feet on the stair.

The boarding-house keeper beamed. Jane Vail was her link with the world. "I declare, she's a marvel to me! Wouldn't you think she'd be dead on her feet and want to crawl into bed quick's ever she had her supper? She won't close an eye before two o'clock in the morning if she does then, but she'll be down to breakfast, right on the dot, fresh as paint, and out for her walk, rain, hail or snow, and then she'll hammer that typewriter all the forenoon!"

"Of course," said Emma Ellis in her small, smothered voice, "Miss Vail often takes a little nap in the afternoon...."

Mrs. Hills was not to be diverted from her star boarder's glories. "Well, it didn't take that Mr. Rodney Harrison very long to get in action, did it?"

"It did not, indeed," said the Irishman, cheerfully. "How long till dinner, Mrs. Hills? Half an hour? Then I'll be stepping up to my room for a letter is keening to be written."

The two women were silent until they heard him mounting the stairs to the third floor. "You see?" said the elder, triumphantly. "What did I tell you? Not a thing on earth between them! Would she be tearing off with another young man, first evening home? And isn't he cool as a cucumber?"

Miss Ellis's narrow little face seemed to ease visibly into looser lines and she sighed. "Yes. You were quite right. Mr. Daragh's mind is on higher things."

The other bridled. "Well, I don't know as you've any call to put it just that way. I guess Jane Vail's a high enough thing for any man to think of! And I guess the truth is, Jane Vail's got other fish to fry!"

Jane, meanwhile, into her tub, out of her tub, flinging herself once more into urban silk and fine linen, doing her hair with swift craft, was entirely happy. It was good to have gone away, at Michael Daragh's rousing word, good to have stayed those sober weeks on the lean, clean Island, good to have done good work and to have speeded Dan'l's parting soul; and it was good to be back, to be going presently into the bright warm world with Rodney Harrison; it was best of all to find her big Irishman as she had found him. Her friend. Her best friend ... best for her. It was a solid satisfaction to have him tabulated and pigeonholed at last and for all time. Michael Daragh was her best friend. That was settled. And she had been a vain, light-minded goose to fancy for an instant that he would misinterpret that foolish little postscript on her last letter,—that he would want to misinterpret it. Michael Daragh had clearly obeyed the command to come apart and be separate, and she should never worry for an instant about him again.

And while she flew into her most satisfactory frock and stood still for Mabel's slow hookings and fastenings and then sent her down to tell the gentleman she would be with him in two minutes, her best friend, newly elected to that high estate, sat alone in his room on the third floor, and there was in his thin face none of the calm which had helped Mrs. Hills to carry her point with Emma Ellis.

There had been a little rite, the evening before, of burning such few letters as he had allowed himself to keep, but he had snatched the last one back from the blaze and cut off the final line, the postscript, with his desk scissors, and put the narrow shred of paper into his wallet. And now, hearing the sound of a taxicab in the street below, he approached his window and looked down through the fast-thickening dusk of the late fall evening. He could not see Jane's exit from the house nor her entrance into the waiting vehicle, but he remained there, his face pressed against the pane, until the machine set noisily forth upon its uptown way. Then he went back to stand before his fire, and he opened his wallet and took out the folded strip of paper and threw it on the coals without reading it again, for he knew it very well by heart, and he was still standing there when the sound of Mabel's vigorous gong summoned him down to dinner.

* * * * *

Rodney Harrison was a trifle annoyed and a trifle amused at Jane's exile, frankly contemptuous of the achievement of a tale in the New England Monthly as compared to vaudeville bill-toppers, wholly glad to have her back. His mother was visiting her people in Boston at the moment, but as soon as she returned, he was very sure, she would want to make that long-delayed call on his young writing friend. As a matter of fact, it was the tale that did it. Mrs. Ormsby Dodd Harrison had not seen her way to the cultivation of a young woman whose end and aim in life was the writing of headline acts for the two-a-day, but a gifted young author who had two charming and thoughtful stories in the brown-gowned magazine that winter and passed likewise the sober portals of the other three of the "Big Four," was quite another thing. Before the holidays, in spite of her telescoping activities at that season, Mrs. Harrison motored down to Washington Square and called on Miss Vail at Mrs. Hills' boarding house, and asked her with just the right admixture of formality and cordiality to dine with them one evening quite simply ... just themselves.

But Miss Vail, it appeared, was not only a very hard-working and ambitious young author, but very much feted and dated socially, and in addition, gave generously of her play time to certain worthy settlements and their concomitant affairs, and two more months elapsed before an evening could be arranged.

Jane wrote of the dinner to Sarah Farraday.

* * * * *

A shame, isn't it, Sally, that we can't be frank and honest? You can't think how it would have comforted Rodney's mother in her black hand-run Spanish lace and the Harrison pearls to have me say, "Be of good cheer, dear lady! I neither design nor aspire to marry your son!"

Then she could have removed her invisible armor and laid her polished weapons by and given herself over to the delights of my sprightly chatter. Rodney's the only son and the only child, and one cannot blame her for being a bit choosey! Harrison's pater, however, seemed to think that he could bear up very cheerfully under such a contingency—charmingly cordial, the dear old thing! Rodney won't be nearly so nice at his age because he's come up in a less gracious period.

But at that he'll be very nice! He is now!



CHAPTER XII

Before the end of her second year in New York, many things, grave and gay, came to pass. Sarah Farraday came down for a fortnight of operas and concerts and went home to spread the marvels of Jane's full and glowing life over the Vermont village; Emma Ellis reluctantly gave up her room at Mrs. Hills' and became resident superintendent of the Hope House Settlement, and Michael Daragh took his noon meal there. Jane went home twice for little visits and found changes even there,—the Teddy-bear, now trudging sturdily about in rompers, had a small sister, and Nannie Slade Hunter was prettier than ever, if a trifle too rotund, and Edward R., very prosperous and pleased with himself, had bought his wife an electric coupe, in which to take his offspring for a safe and opulent airing. Martin Wetherby, Assistant Cashier, had somehow put youth aside. His stoutness had closed in on him like an enemy. His mother admitted to Jane that he did not take sufficient exercise. "He doesn't seem to ... care," she said, and looked pointedly away. To herself she put it dramatically, with great relish; never, to the day of her death, would she forgive the girl who had ruined her son's life. Jane wished with all her good-natured heart that Marty would marry, happily and handsomely—it would be such a relief to have Mrs. Wetherby complacently triumphant instead of heavily reproachful. And even Sarah Farraday never referred to him as other than, "Poor old Marty." Jane had her moments of wishing that they might, in village parlance, "make a match of it," but they were moments only. Sarah was much too fine; she must find Sarah a suitor of parts, somehow, somewhere.

It was during the second of her visits home that Miss Lydia Vail died. There was no dreariness of illness or misery of suffering; she died exactly as she had lived, plumply and pleasantly, in the plump and pleasant faith that was hers, and Jane left the middle-aged maid in charge of the elm-shaded, green-shuttered house and went back to New York with a grief which was more pensive than poignant. She refused, thereafter, to rent the old home, but loaned it instead, the servant with it, to various and sundry of her city clan,—now the girl who had carried her first playlet to success, now to shabby music students at Mrs. Hills' whom Sarah Farraday was pledged to regale with tea and cheer in the afternoons, now to sad-eyed women of Michael Daragh's recommendation.

Sometimes she ran up herself with a little house-party,—down-at-the-heel vaudevilleans, elderly, concert-going ladies from the boarding house, Emma Ellis and another settlement worker—and made an expenditure for food and entertainment which secretly scandalized the ancient maid.

She wrote her first slim little novel which was accepted for serial publication and Rodney Harrison insisted that there was the germ of a three-act play in it. She set to work on it and labored harder than ever before in her life, happily, hot-cheeked, shining-eyed, wrote and rewrote and clipped and amplified and smoothed and polished, and one day Sarah Farraday ran over to the Hunter's house with a telegram.

"Nannie! It's accepted! Jane's three-act play is accepted! Did you ever in all your born days see such luck? She just can't fail!" Her earnest, blonde face was a little wistful. "I never knew any human being to have so much!"

Mrs. Edward R. was herding the Teddy-bear into the coupe and she handed little Sarah Anne to her friend. "Get in, Sally dear, and I'll run you home. I'm taking the children over to Mother Hunter's for the day." She steadied Sarah and her burden to a seat and then tucked herself neatly in, and started her bright vehicle competently. "Well, I don't know.... It's all very fine, of course, but I can think of a good deal she hasn't got!"

"Oh, of course ..." said the music teacher. After a moment she sighed. "Poor old Marty.... Well, we can't lead other people's lives for them, can we?"

"No, we can't," Mrs. Edward R. admitted, contentedly. She bowled Sarah smoothly back to the burlapped studio in time for the eleven-twenty pupil.

* * * * *

Jane, meanwhile, after wiring to Sarah, flew to Michael Daragh with her joyful tidings and lunched with him and Emma Ellis at Hope House. The Irishman, who had read the little play and knew its clean verve and charm, was radiant for her, and the superintendent managed grudging congratulations. They were in the sitting room after the meal, and something seemed to smite Jane, swiftly, with regard to Emma Ellis; her bright eyes traveled over the whole of her,—the shabby hair, the hot and steaming face, the moist fingers with their dull and shapeless nails,—the needlessly cruel ugliness of blouse and skirt and shoes; the utter unloveliness of her. As on the day of her return from Three Meadows, when Emma Ellis had supposed Michael Daragh had met her at the train, again her heart melted to mercy within her. Oh, the poor thing! The poor thing——

"Miss Ellis, I've taken your chair, haven't I?"

"It doesn't matter where I sit, Miss Vail. This one does well enough for me," she answered, virtuously.

Jane sat down on a footstool near the window. "Do take it—not that there's any cloying luxury, even there! Is it in the constitution of Hope House to have only hideous and uncomfortable furniture?"

"You cannot know much about this sort of work, Miss Vail, or you'd realize that our funds are always limited, and that we must conserve them for necessities." It was a depressingly warm day, and the superintendent felt it and showed it, and she reflected bitterly that Jane Vail was the sort of person who was warm and glowing in January, when normal people were pinched and blue, and cool and crisp in September, when those who had to keep right on working, no matter what the weather was, had pools of perspiration under their eyes and shirtwaists adhering gummily to their backs. And she always wore things in summer which gave out cunning suggestions of shady brooksides, and managed—in that theatrical way of hers—the effect of bringing a breeze in with her.

"I wonder," said Jane, "if my silly little paper people get the breath of life blown into them and my play goes over and I have regal royalties, if I couldn't do something for Hope House?"

"You could, indeed, God save you kindly for the thought," said Michael Daragh, happily. "If your play'll run to it, you could be buying us two bathtubs and——"

"The linoleum in the kitchen"—Miss Ellis forgot her bitterness for a moment—"is simply in shreds!"

"I will not!" said Jane, crisply. "Bathtubs and linoleum, indeed! Wring them out of your Board! I shall give you a Sleepy Hollow couch with bide-a-wee cushions, and deep, cuddly armchairs and a lamp or two with shades as mellow as autumn woods! And some perfectly frivolous pictures which aren't in the least inspiring or uplifting,—and every single girl's room shall have a pink pincushion!" Then at their blankness, she softened. "Oh, very well,—you shall have your tubs and your linoleum, if you'll let me humanize the rest of the house,—will you?" She came to her feet with a spring of incredible energy. "Come along, Miss Ellis,—let's have a look upstairs! We don't need you, M.D.—this is woman-stuff."

The superintendent pulled herself upstairs with a sticky hand on the banister, "Well, I don't know where you'd begin, Miss Vail. Everything's threadbare...."

They went through drab halls and into drab rooms where drab occupants greeted them drably, and Jane ached with the ugliness of it. Wasn't it going to be fun—if the play went over "big"—to vanquish this much of the hideousness of the world?

She stopped before a closed door. "What is this?"

Miss Ellis was walking past it. "That's my room."

"Well, may I see it?"

"Oh," she said, colorlessly, "I didn't suppose you'd want to fix it over...." She opened the door and stepped in, crossing to the undraped window and running up the stiff shade of faded and streaked olive green.