"But of course I shall," said Jane, following her in. "Well—I might have known!"

"What?" asked Miss Ellis, defensively.

"That you'd take the smallest and shabbiest room in the house for yourself."

"Oh, well ... it doesn't matter. I'm not in it very much." She walked over to the warped golden oak bureau and straightened the metal button hook with the name of a shoe shop pressed into it into line with the whisk broom. Besides these two articles there bloomed upon the bureau's top a small pincushion made from a piece of California redwood bark, and a widowed saucer enrolled as a pin-tray, and into the frame of the mirror was stuck a snapshot of an unnecessarily plain small boy.

"That's my little nephew," said Emma Ellis, seeing Jane's eye upon it. "My sister Bertha's boy."

"He—he looks bright, doesn't he?" said Jane, hastily. She looked about her, consideringly. "You know, I'd like to do this room in deep creamy yellow. That will make it look lighter and seem larger, and it will be nice with your hair."

"My hair?..." said Miss Ellis, limply.

"You have such nice hair, but I do wish you'd do it differently," said Jane with anxious friendliness. "You have a mile of it, haven't you?"

The superintendent's tucked-in lips and her whole taut figure visibly relaxed. "I used to have nice hair," she admitted in the time-hallowed formula. "I wish you could have seen it four years ago. It's come out something terrible! Well," she made a virtue of it—"I never spend any time fussing with it."

"But you ought to, you know! Let me play with it a minute, will you? I adore doing hair. Please sit down—I just want to try something with it—something I thought of as I watched you to-day." She pressed her into a stiff chair.

"Well ..." said Miss Ellis grudgingly. She produced a comb from a bleakly neat top drawer.

"Heavens, what neatness," said Jane. "And the brush, please! You ought to give it a hundred and twenty strokes a night,—see, like this? No, it wouldn't be wasting time! Just consider the good thoughts you could be thinking. You could memorize poetry or dates in history or say your prayers,—and you'd say a prayer of thankfulness in a year, when you looked at the result. It would shine like patent leather." Her fingers flew. "There! Now you can look. See how it brings out the good lines of your face? Wait,—where's your hand mirror? You haven't one? My word! Well, you can get the idea, even so! Will you try doing it this way? It won't take but a minute longer. Just to please me?"

"Well ..." she couldn't seem to think of anything else to say, and she had a ridiculous feeling that she might be going to cry.

"And—do you mind my saying these things?—I've always bullied my friends about their clothes and colors—I do wish you wouldn't wear white, and navy blue."

"I always supposed white was right for every one."

"It's wicked for most people! Cream, buff, tan, apricot, burnt orange—Let me come down and go shopping with you some day, will you? I never cared about dressing dolls but I revel in dressing people."

"Well ..." said Miss Ellis once more, and this time her stubborn chin quivered.

"Shall we go downstairs?" Jane moved ahead of her, her eyes averted, her voice cheerfully commonplace. "Simply torrid up here, isn't it? I'll come some cool morning, and we'll make lists and plans—if my play goes over——"

But before her gay little play had been running three months, picking up speed like a motor as it ran—she had kept her word to Hope House. She became the Lady Bountiful of the bathtubs and linoleums, of the frivolous lay pictures and the autumn shaded lamps, and she wrote impudently to Sarah Farraday that when she looked upon all that she had created she saw that it was very good.

Even Emma Ellis has undergone a sea change; she's learned to do her hair decently, and I've actually persuaded her that while it's quite right to let her light so shine before men, it's different with her nose, and you can't think what a dusting of flesh-colored powder does for her! And I've got her out of blue serge and white blouses, and into cream and buff and orange and brown, and I daresay Michael Daragh will now fall in love with her excellent qualities and her enhanced appearance, and I shall lose my best friend. (E.E. would never allow friendships.) I shall probably wish I'd left her in her state of Ugly Ducklingness, for I simply can't spare St. Michael from my scheme of things!



CHAPTER XIII

Jane and the Irishman came into the Settlement one day to find the superintendent red-eyed, with two books on her desk. It was clear that she had been having a luxuriously miserable time. "I've just finished two of the most powerful stories," she said, polishing the precious powder from her nose with a damp handkerchief. "Every girl should read them—and every man!"

"I wonder at you, Emma Ellis," said Michael Daragh, "the way you'll be keening over a printed tale, when you've your heart and head and hands full of real woes about you, surely!"

"Oh, Mr. Daragh, if you'd just sit down and read I and The Narrow Path! Both written anonymously,—and you just feel the human heartthrob in every line."

"I'll not be cluttering my mind with the likes of that, woman dear!"

"I've read them both," said Jane, slipping out of her furs and cuddling into one of the great new chairs, "and I'm afraid I think they're fearful piffle."

"Miss Vail!" Her face snapped back into its old lines. (Miss Vail really mustn't think that because she was so situated, financially, that she could do kind and generous things—which others would do if they could—that her word was law on every subject!)

"I'll have to be reading them, to decide between the two of you," said Michael, lighting his mellowed old pipe.

Miss Ellis winced a little as she looked at her new curtains.

"But it's good for moths," said Jane, catching her eye. "No, Michael, you needn't fuss up your orderly mind with anything so frivolous and distracting. I can tell you the gist of them both in a few well-chosen phrases! The theme of both is that when lovely—and lonely—woman stoops to earning her own living she finds—not too late, but alas, immediately—that men betray! That every prospect pleases and only man is vile! These two heroines set out to make their own way; their faces are their fortune and very nearly their finish! One is a very young girl, the other an unhappy wife, fleeing with, and, one might be pardoned for imagining, protected by, a young child. Each is a pattern of dewy innocence and determined virtue, but no matter where they hie or hide, the villains still pursue."

"Of course," said Miss Ellis in her small, smothered voice, "if you're going to make a joke of it——"

"My dear Miss Ellis, it is a joke! One of them gets no further than the station in her initial flight when she is accosted by a young millionaire—insulted. (If you were a Constant Reader of popular fiction, Michael Daragh, you'd know how difficult it is for millionaires to retain the shreds of human decency.) And that's just the prelude, but it introduces the motif which runs through the entire composition. Staid, middle-aged husbands of friends, editors, business men, authors,—Don Juans all! Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, enmesh the road the ladies are to wander in."

"Well," said Michael Daragh, shaking his head, "I'm telling you there's a rare lot of enmeshing, Jane Vail."

Emma Ellis wagged an eager head. "You can't possibly know, in your sheltered life——"

"But I've been about a bit in my day—(didn't I come from my verdant village to the wicked metropolis?)—and I've known men in all ages and stages. My feeling is that these girls must have had a small 'come-hither' in one eye at least, or occasionally men might have passed the butter without a sinister meaning, might have seen them home without attempting to abduct them!"

"You came directly to Mrs. Hills, whom you had known for years," said Emma Ellis. "And you knew that Mr. Harrison who helped you to place your writing, and you had enough money to live on."

"But I've roamed the city alone, all hours of night or day, and I used to go back and forth to boarding-school alone—a day's and a night's journey, and abroad I used to trot off to galleries and museums by myself, and——"

"But you always had your background, Jane Vail, the way you knew how safe you were."

"You can't prove these books are foolish by your experience, Miss Vail." Emma Ellis was glowing from the Irishman's championship.

Jane was still for a moment. "No; I don't suppose I can prove it by any experience I've had in the past," she said, slowly, "but I can prove it by an experience I'm going to have!"

"Now what do you mean by that?" Daragh wanted to know. "Are you telling your fortune?"

Jane sat up straight, warm-cheeked, excited. "No, but I'm going out, alone and unaided, under a neat new name, with some cheap, plain clothes in a cheap, plain trunk, to Chicago, with fifty dollars only between me and the cold world,—and see what I see!"

"Well, now, God save us, but that's the mad plan, surely!"

"It isn't mad at all! I want a little change,—I've been working like a dynamo—and it will be loads of fun and I'll get corking copy out of it."

"It won't be a fair test," the superintendent protested. "You'll be—you, all the time."

"That's very nice of you," Jane gave her her glad boy's grin, "but I won't be. Don't you suppose I have imagination enough to project myself into another type? For a month I'll support myself in any way I can, nursery governess, mother's helper, upstair-work, shop, anything I can get. I'll be that sort of girl, dress, diction, everything. I'll write a truthful bulletin of my luck to you two, but you won't have any address, and no one will know that—let's see ... Edna Miles—isn't that reasonable?—that Edna Miles is the lucky Jane Vail who wrote Cross Your Heart and has a wicked balance in the bank!" She pulled herself up out of the depths of the great chair and put on her furs. "I'm quite keen about it! It's going to be more fun than anything I've ever done. Tell Jane good-by, old dears! You'll hear from Edna Miles before long!"

"Wait a bit till we talk it over," said Daragh. "'Tis a wild plan, I'm telling you, will waste your time and——"

But Jane was out of the door, with only the echo of her laugh behind her.

"I don't think she'll really do it," said Miss Ellis. "When she comes to think it over, and realizes how uncomfortable she'll be——"

"She'll be doing it if she says she will," said the Irishman, gloomily, "and all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't be stopping her, the way she——"

Jane thrust her bright head in at the door again. "I'll play fair, and I'll prove my point,—that you see pretty much what you look for, that you get pretty nearly what you give, that common or garden kindness is mirrored in kindness, that affection fairly boomerangs back! And after all, you know, the thing that made the lamb love Mary so is the axis on which the world turns! With which pearl of wisdom I give you good-morrow!"

This time she went in earnest, and the Settlement workers were left alone in their transformed parlor to consider the madness or merit of her little plan. Michael saw her at breakfast next morning but she was gayly uncommunicative as to her plans, and that night Mrs. Hills reported that her star boarder (who had the two best and biggest rooms, now, and a dressing-room and bath and her own telephone) had gone west for a month or so for a change.

The first letter came two days later and was addressed to Miss Emma Ellis at the Hope House Settlement, but the salutation was to them both——

DEAR EMMA ELLIS AND MICHAEL DARAGH,

I am writing this on the train as the intelligent readers will gather from the chirography. I have just had my breakfast, and it was funny to study the menu card for inexpensive nourishment with staying powers. I shared a tiny table with a large gentleman whose rubicund neck hung over his collar in back in what was distinctly not the line of beauty, a chatty soul, conversation not at all impeded by food ... needed a few table traffic regulations ... The noble head of the animal to whose tribe he belongs beamed from his lapel and his genial heart from his bright little eyes, and he worried heartily because I didn't "tuck away a regular breakfast."

I had loads of fun getting my adventure trousseau together yesterday! I flatter myself that I quite look the part,—my meek, brown serge and cotton gloves and my oldest shoes and a well-meaning little hat which took more courage than all the rest. I couldn't quite rise—or sink—to a straw suitcase. I have my shabbiest one—without labels! This is a slow, cheap train and my bye-bye box was in the upper flat, and I haven't spent a penny for chocolate or magazines, and I'm actually beginning to be Edna Miles!

Next Morning, Nearly in Chicago.

Last night the beamish Buffalo, who had chatted off and on all day and had worried over my modest luncheon from across the aisle, insisted that dinner was to be not only with but "on" him, but I only consented on the "with" plan, and paid my own little check and tip. He said I was a darned independent little piece but he liked my spunk! He asked me where I was bound and I said—sighing a little for good measure, Emma—that I was going to Chicago to earn my living. Now in I or The Narrow Path he would at once have given me his card and offered to "fix me up with something at the office," but the Buffalo merely said "That so!" mistily through his pie a la mode and that "Chi" was a great little old berg.

Isn't that one-in-the-eye for your theory, at the start?

Time to be brushed off. Edna Miles gives the Ethiopian only a quarter, but she hasn't demanded any service.

JANE, THE HONEST WORKING GIRL.

Same Night, 9.30.

Before I get into my doll's-size bed I'll pen these sleepy lines. My room is just about the dimensions of a bath mat. It contains the aforementioned bed (I shall have to put myself into it with a shoe horn!) an chair, on which I sit, and a bureau. The room must have been built around them ... clearly they didn't come in through the door. My little trunk has to wait outside in the hall like a faithful dog. When I look at my face in the mirror I'm sure that Heaven will protect this particular working girl; that my face will be not my fortune but my defender. It looks as if a nervous student had been practicing facial surgery on me. The carpet is just the color of deviled ham, and on the wall is a shiny, violent-colored picture in a tarnished gilt frame which shows a dangerously fat infant in a crib with a kitten standing on its stomach.

I left the train without incident. I didn't even see the Buffalo to say good-by. In the station I purposely wandered about a bit and asked questions and suddenly a brisk little woman with "Stranger's Friend" on her bonnet dashed up and asked me where I was going. I told her I was alone in her great city, looking for work, and she told me not to worry,—that she would look after me, and she has,—oh, but hasn't she! She thought a minute and then said, "I know of a good Christian room for you." I was so intrigued by the thought of a Christian room that I could hardly wait to see it. (I'm in it. This is it.)

She told me just where to sit and wait for her, and there I dutifully sat, clutching my luggage, and she ran off to telephone and said it was all fixed—the lady would have me, and it would be five dollars a week for room, breakfast and dinner. And she would put me on the right car and tell me just where to get off, and the landlady would direct me to the Employment Agency later. Just as she was seeing me to the street I spied the Buffalo in the offing, waving to me, and I waved back, and he started briskly toward me.

"Who is that man?" the Stranger's Friend wanted to know. I said he was a kind gentleman I had met on the train but I didn't know his name. Well, the next thing I knew she had whirled me cleverly into an eddy of crowd and thence into the Ladies' Waiting-Room and was regarding me sternly. "We will wait here until he goes away. That is the very first thing to remember, my dear. Never talk to strange men!" And I said, "Yes, ma'am, I will," and "No, ma'am, I won't," and presently she reconnoitered and said that the coast was clear, and put me on my car, with minute directions for finding my new home.... It is easy and comforting to believe that there is, literally, no place like home, no other place. I shall call my landlady Mrs. Mussel,—it suits her so perfectly, the way she clings to her drab background, and closes up with a snap at every approach. I daresay she means well. It is necessary to believe that she does. She states that she sets only a plain home table ... and there is a sort of atmospheric menu card—coming events casting their savors before, stale memories of the past....

She marched me straight off to the Intelligence Office. There was nothing for me, but I signed up and am to be there at eight in the morning. And now, unless I stop, I shall fall asleep and out of my chair and dash my brains out on the deviled-ham carpet. The Laboring Classes keep early hours.

G—N—

J.

Thereafter the bulletins came thick and fast to Hope House, always to the two of them together, now addressed to Miss Ellis and then to the Irishman. The second followed swiftly on the heels of the first.

The Next Night.

I went early to the Intelligence Office. (Intelligence!) The other Judy O'Gradys and I sat in waiting while our sisters under the skin, the Colonel's ladies, looked us over. I registered for nursery governess, Mother's Help, second maid, or companion, with Mrs. Mussel and the S.F. for reference, but to-day all the cry for help was for kitchen mechanics!

When I reported my empty net to Mrs. Mussel on returning, she emitted a little desolate cluck. She foresees her Christian room rent overdue, poor thing. The kind little S.F. dropped in and bade me be of good cheer. She's a brick, and I feel so guiltily aware of tricking her.

I tried to lure my landlady out to a movie, but she thriftily refused. She was watching at the window when I came home to-night and just at the steps I dropped my five cents' worth of literature and a man who was passing picked it up for me. He glanced at the page as he handed it back and grinned, "That's a great little old story!" And I agreed cordially, "It sure is!" and thanked him and ran up the steps. I wish you could have seen my landlady's face. I thought at first I would be sent to bed without my supper. When it comes to your sex, Michael Daragh, her slogan is—"Run, daughter, the Indians are upon us!"

G—N—

J.

It was several days, then, before they heard again from her, and Emma Ellis secretly considered that Miss Vail was without doubt giving up and coming home, but Michael Daragh found himself angrily anxious. But the letter was reassuring.

On the Job.

DEAR PEOPLE,

Edna Miles is nursery governess to the two small offspring of Mrs. Arnold Laney, an opulent, hard-finished lady who cleverly found the one pearl in the oyster bed, meaning me, this morning. I dashed thankfully home and almost jolted Mrs. Mussel out of her gloom, bought two gingham dresses for mornings and hied me to my new home. I have a cot in the nursery and one bureau drawer and two hooks in the closet and wrath in my heart, but the kiddies want a story now and I must stop. They are sallow, fretty, plain little things, but I'm conscientiously liking them as hard as ever I can. The work shouldn't be hard, and I have forty a month and three hours every Thursday afternoon and every other Sunday. I don't like my missus very much, but the master of the house is a typical T.B.M., only I should say, from my brief glimpse, that things at home make him tireder than his business does. I eat with the children in the breakfast room and the food is rather awful. However, the game is young. Wish me luck, old dears!

It was eight days before another letter came, and then it was headed——

Back in my Christian Room!

My dears, here I am! I lasted just exactly one week. But I don't care. I didn't wait to be fired—I went off—spontaneous combustion.

I did my honest best at first. It was a horrible house, spilling over with fretful people and fretful things. There wasn't a cool space to hang your eye on anywhere on the walls; you had to make your way through the furniture and bric-a-brac as through traffic. The food, save when there were guests, was wretched. The other servants—a cross cook and a sharp-tongued second-girl—were inefficient and lazy and quarrelsome.

The father was a dim, infrequent person who hardly registered on the family film at all. He looked overworked and underfed and the only time I ever heard him speak with any vigor was the night before I left, when he was vehemently insisting (their room was just across the hall from the nursery) that they simply had to cut down expenses, and she was just as vehemently maintaining that it couldn't be done.

And the children! If any one had told me, eight days ago, that there were two children loose in the land that I could not love, I should have done battle. The boy was the sort of little boy who makes you feel that Herod had the right idea, and the girl was the sort of little girl who makes you feel it was a pity to stop with the slaughter of the male infant.

It was the last day of my week. The youngsters and I had had a bad breakfast and a skimpy, cold luncheon, and I was bidden to dress them in their fussiest best and bring them in at the tag end of Mrs. Laney's bridge afternoon. They were just sitting down to tea as I came in. Tea! I was absolutely hungry after the long succession of miserable meals, ready to recite "Only Three Grains of Corn, Mother," with moving gestures, and the sallow little wretches beside me were clear cases of malnutrition. Well, there were three kinds of delectable sandwiches and consomme with whipped cream and chocolate with whipped cream and an opulent salad and wonderful little cakes—four kinds—and candy and salted nuts. My mouth watered and I know my nostrils quivered. First, I blush to say, I thought of hungry me, and then I thought of the undernourished children, and then I thought of the badly fed and badly cared for and badly treated husband, and I looked over the other eight or ten women and catalogued them at once as Mrs. Laney's type, and suddenly I decided to give myself a treat. I reached calmly over and selected a handful of sandwiches and cakes and gave them to the youngsters and sent them up to the nursery, and then, my dears, with what solid satisfaction you cannot possibly guess, I told my mistress exactly what I thought of her. She was aghast and scared; she thought I was a maniac, a desperate fanatic.

"Edna, Edna," she gasped, "be quiet! My guests—these ladies——"

"Ladies! Ladies!" I pounced on it. "Do you know what 'ladies' means? Of course you don't,—you're much too ignorant. It means—'loaf-givers', providers, dispensers of bounty, care-takers, home-makers. You—all of you—with your lazy, thick bodies trussed into your straight fronts and your fat feet crammed into bursting pumps and your idle hands blazing with jewels" (I know I was bromidic there, but my Phillipic was too swift to be polished) "and your empty heads dyed and marcelled, you're not loaf-givers,—you're not givers at all, you're takers! You're loafers—cumberers of the earth—fat slugs, that's what you are, each and every one of you! You"—I pointed to Mrs. Laney—"you don't even see that your children are properly fed! You don't make home livable, let alone lovable for your husband, and at this moment"—I swept the feast with a fierce and baleful eye—"you're a thief!"

She shrieked at that and all the women got to their feet. It was as if I'd thrown a bomb—and I daresay they thought I might at any instant.

"A thief," I said, "takes what doesn't belong to him, and this doesn't belong to you! You're deep in debts,—bills that your poor, harassed husband cannot pay!"—and before she could emit the furious words on her lips—"Oh, no, you're not going to discharge me! You can't, for I've left already! I wouldn't stay another night in your wretched house, I wouldn't eat another of your wretched meals. You may keep my week's wage. I wish you'd buy the children beefsteak with it but I've no doubt it will go for cocktails and henna!"

Then, while they gasped and jibbered with rage and got behind each other and shook in their bulging pumps, I turned on my heel and made a stunning exit, gathered up my belongings and came away.

There was no welcome on Mrs. Mussel's mat, but I'm still glowing. Aren't you both immensely pleased with me? I am with myself!

J.



CHAPTER XIV

The Next Night.

MY DEARS,

You know, the woman who runs the Stupidity Bureau didn't think me a heroine at all! Quitting your job at the end of the first week, going off explosively, as I did, doesn't endear the Honest Working Girl to the management. It simply isn't done. She was so frigid that I decided to scratch domestic labor from my list. I shall join the gainful army in the busy marts.

Mrs. Mussel telephoned to the Stranger's Friend and the kind little S.F. bustled right out and took me to a stereopticon lecture on the bee. Subtle, wasn't it? Treatment by indirection.

And she gave me a note to a department store which will probably take me on.

Meanwhile,

G—N—

J.

Next Night.

They did, dear people, they did. In the basement. In the kitchen ware. All day long I was learning to sell clothespins and eggbeaters and wringers and cookie cutters and I wish you could see my hands! I wonder if they'd consider me up stage if I wore gloves? I'd better not chance it.

They were all ever so decent about helping me. The floorwalker was especially kind. (I can see you fling up your head like a warhorse at the smell of powder, Emma Ellis, but he's a meek young thing who likes to burble of his baby.)

But I'm a woman of my word and this chronicle is faithful and true. Coming home on the L, I saw the beamish Buffalo, and he saw me and plunged to me through the crowd, saying gleefully, "Say, girlie, I've thought of you a million times, and I—say, listen, I got in awful Dutch with the wife about you, and she said"—but I slipped nimbly into my local and the door slapped shut between us.

Your heroines, Emma, were not so light on their feet. But I honestly felt mean,—he did look so friendly and fat.

I'm to have eight a week in my basement. Mrs. Mussel gets five of it and the rest I may waste in riotous living.

Good night!

JANE.

Three Nights Later.

DEAR M.D. AND E.E.,

Please dash downtown and have a million service medals struck off and then rush around and pin them on all the shop girls in the world! The unutterable weariness—the aching, burning, sagging, sickening, faint tiredness!

If ever again, as long as I live, I'm cross to a saleswoman, no matter how cross she may be to me, then may God send a sudden angel down to grasp me by the hair and bear me far and drop me into the kitchen ware on eight a week and my throbbing feet!

JANE.

Saturday Night.

MY DEARS, I'm turned off. After all the trying and enduring and the dead-tiredness, I'm turned off. The kind little floorwalker hated to do it. "Say, listen, sister," he said, "it's like this. We gotter let somebuddy go. Holidays comin', people ain't goin' to buy kitchen ware. Sure they ain't. Plug up th' leakin' kettle an' buy Mummer th' rhinestone combs! Well, you're the last to come, see? You gotter be the first to go."

I bought Mrs. Mussel a shrinking bunch of violets to soften the blow, but she wondered if I couldn't get my money back (her money she figures, poor thing!) if I hurried right downtown with them and explained that I'd changed my mind.

Heavens, but we had a horrible supper.

Very down indeed,

JANE.

Monday Night.

DEAR PEOPLE,

I'm doing my best to uplift Mrs. Mussel, but she's the undisputed Queen of all the Glooms and my sprightly efforts fall on stony ground. For her peace of mind I divulged the fact that I have nearly thirty dollars left which makes me really a capitalist, but in her eyes I am simply an Unemployed.

I rush into the house glowing and braced from a brisk walk but my cheer soon gutters out,—I might as well try to illuminate a London fog with a Christmas tree candle.

I try to help her with her errands and marketing and to-day I was staggering home under a load of parcels and slipped on the glassy pavement just in front of the house and fell flat. A smart motor which was spinning by slid to a standstill and the driver jumped out and ran back to me. He was a beautiful big youth and the machine was one of those low, classy, dachshund effects in mauve. THE MAIDEN'S DREAM picked me up and all my packages and looked us all over to make sure we weren't damaged. One of the parcels contained liver, and it became unwrapped.... (Dost like the picture, Jane Vail bearing home the liver for her frugal evening meal?) He did it up very deftly and then he asked me if he couldn't give me a lift. I said he certainly could but for the fact that I was already arrived at my destination. Then he said, "I'll give you a hand with the plunder, then. Which house?"—and THE MAIDEN'S DREAM and the liver and I mounted Mrs. Mussel's steps together. He was as big and bonny as the impossible young persons in the backs of magazines, and he said it was tough weather to be walking and I said it was tough weather to be out of a job, and he said that was tough luck. (See how I gave him an opening, E.E.?) I thanked him and he said it was nothing and sped down to his speedster and I went in to my Christian room. Mrs. Mussel had been doing her regular Sister Anne act at the window and had "seen it all," she assured me ... I will omit her Phillipic....

JANE.

Wednesday.

Still no gainful occupation, people! Compared to her present attitude, Mrs. Mussel was Jest and Youthful Jollity before. And the blacker things get the earlier we rise. It seems to me that no sooner have I fitted myself compactly into my doll's-size bed and closed my eyes than I hear her mournful summons to another day. Oh, the inky gloom of these murky mornings! I know that the young woman who said so lyrically, "If you're waking, call me early, call me early, Mother dear!" is popularly supposed to have died without issue, but that is a misconception. I shrink from putting a Spoon River scandal on her mossy tombstone, but my Mrs. Mussel is her lineal descendant.

To-day I was racked by a yearning for the flesh-pots. I made myself as near smart as possible and flew for the smartest tea-room on Michigan Avenue. If I could stay me with Orange Pekoe and comfort me with toasted crumpets and English marmalade—But just as I was blithely footing it across the threshold the S.F. rose up behind me like a genie from a bottle and plucked me back.

"Edna Miles," she gasped, "my poor child, you can't eat in there! It's the most expensive place in the city. Besides,—it is half-past four,—you'll spoil your dinner!"

Very peevishly and hollowly,

JANE.

Thursday Night. On the Joyful New Job.

Oh, my dear people, but I do believe in Fairies! I've met one personally! While we sat at melancholy mending this morning, my doleful landlady and I, after my fruitless tour of the agencies, who should dash up to our dull door but THE MAIDEN'S DREAM! In his shining chariot! Mrs. Mussel said, "Edna, you go straight upstairs and lock yourself in your room and I'll 'tend to him!" But I was at the door before he had time to ring the bell.

"Great luck," he said, "'fraid you'd be gone. Got a job yet?"

"No."

"Well, I was telling my sister about you, and she thinks she has just the place for you. Want to hop in the boat and run out to see her now and talk it over?"

Mrs. Mussel said of course he hadn't any sister, and that I ought to be ashamed of myself and I would probably never be seen or heard of again, and she knew he had a poison needle and she rang up the Stranger's Friend, but before she got her connection I was spinning up the North Shore. THE MAIDEN'S DREAM lives in a young palace and Miss Marjorie, his sister, is also Peter Pan's sister. He explained to me, as we went, that she had been thrown from her horse and would never walk again, and so she "did things for girls, you know—keeps her busy——"

She looks exactly like a Fra Angelico angel! She kept me to luncheon in her room with her—oh, flesh-pots!—hot broth and tiny chops and pop-overs and magic salad and chocolate and ginger-bread—and told me about this extraordinary job. Then THE MAIDEN'S DREAM whizzed me home for my things (I found Mrs. M. and the S.F. holding an agitated Directors' Meeting), but when the S.F. heard Miss Marjorie's last name, she beamed and brought me out here.

Miss Marjorie explained that I'm to be more or less of a maid-companion to my pretty little mistress. She's a limp and lovely nymph who's quarreled with her husband and is in hiding in this funny old house which belonged to her family, in a weird neighborhood where none of her own set would ever discover her. The house is comfortable enough inside, but the locality is a rather rough one, and there is not even a telephone. There is a cook and a cleaner-by-the-day, and the new maid-companion, so she should be reasonably well looked after.

Whoops, my dears! Fifty dollars a month and almost nothing to do! This is the Promised Land!

Joyfully,

JANE.

Monday.

DEAR PEOPLE,

The cook is cross because she drinks and she drinks because she is cross, and I have persuaded my nymph to let her go and give me a try at it. The cleaner-by-the-day will do the grubby things and I shall like it. Time to get luncheon! Wish you might drop in to sample my fare!

JANE.

P.S. There is the most engaging grocery boy with red hair and a heart-twisting grin. I'm not sure I wasn't considering him when I turned kitchen mechanic. Denny Dolan is his name and God loves the Irish!

J.

Wednesday.

It's fun, my dears, every inch of it, from my little lady's breakfast tray to Denny's extra trips with things he "forgot."

She wanted to give me the cook's wages in addition to mine, because she says I do all the work of both places, but I modestly compromised on seventy-five and on my first day out I'm going to take Mrs. Mussel a regal present.

Opulently,

JANE.

Friday.

MY DEAR PEOPLE,

My nymph is ill and unhappy and grieving for her husband, but she won't send for him, and it's the time of all times when he should be with her. I went the five blocks to the drug store and telephoned Miss Marjorie about her, and she sent the old family doctor, and when he left her eyes were red, and I suppose he was urging her to make it up.

She's such a vague, sweet, helpless thing! This dreary neighborhood is bad for her.

Denny Dolan says "there's a hard-boiled bunch hangin' around here," and warns me against venturing out after dark, even to the post-box.

JANE.

P.S. He brought me a paper bag of gum drops to-day!

A Week Later.

Almost too busy to write, my dears, what with cooking and catering and maiding and companioning. Besides, I'll have you to know I'm keeping company! It's walking out with Denny Dolan I am! I get the cleaning woman to stay with my nymph for an hour, and I'm stepping out with my young man. Twice to the movies we've been, and had dripping ice-cream cones afterwards!

So no more at present, for a girl would be thinking of her beau the way she has no time to be palavering on paper and he waiting in the alley!

DENNY'S GIRL.

The Next Night.

I went into town to-day and I met the Buffalo just as I was leaving a Loop car, and it seemed only the fair and sporting thing to let him speak to me.

He beamed more beamishly than ever. "Say, listen, girlie," he said, "I've had the deuce of a time, losin' you every time I find you! Say, I was startin' to tell you the other day,—the wife gimme fits when I told her about you. Sure, she did." I stood very still and looked at him and listened. "Yeah. Calls me a big boob. 'You big boob,' she says. 'You sleeper! Her tellin' you she was a stranger and all that, and lookin' for work, an' you never give her my address!' Honest, she trimmed me for fair. I got to beat it now, but here's her card, see?—Telephone'n everything, and she wants you to call her up. She wants to have you out to dinner, Aggie does, and have you meet some of her lady friends and get you acquainted. Say, ring her up, will you, sure? Gee, she was some sore at the old man! Bye!"

He leaped into his Express, and vanished, and I could have sat down in the midst of the scurrying crowd and wept with shame and joy and gratitude. I rang Aggie up at once, and I could just see her, from her cozy voice.

How about it, Emma Ellis? Do I score? I'm dining with them soon.

JANE.

P.S.—Do you realize that my month is up? And my point is won? But I'm going to stay on and see my nymph safely through her dark days.

A Week Later.

Denny and I went to see "Twin Hearts" this evening and in the meltingest part of the film he held my hand. I thought it was about time to unmask, so I said—retrieving my hand—that I wasn't a regular kitchen mechanic but a volunteer.

"My real job," I said, "is writing. I'm a writer."

"Sure you are!" he chuckled delightedly. "You'n me both! I wrote this spiel here! I'm Henry W. Dickens!"

I couldn't seem to convince him of anything but that I was "some little kidder." He undertook to tell the world about that. To-morrow, in the garish light of day, when he dumps his neat parcels on my spotless table, I must really explain that——

The Next Afternoon.

DEAR E.E. AND M.D.,

I'm perished for sleep, but I'll write what I can. Just as I got to "that" above, my nymph called me. She was ill,—terribly, terrifyingly ill, and even I saw that there wasn't an instant to lose. And not a soul to send to the telephone.

I couldn't leave her—but I had to leave her! It didn't enter my head to be afraid—only of not getting the doctor in time. Denny's warnings were forgotten. I had done one block of the five when a man stepped out of a dark hallway, and halted in front of me.

Even then, until he spoke, I wasn't really frightened. But when he did,—I tell you, Emma Ellis and Michael Daragh, all the horror and wickedness, all the filth and sin of the world seemed to be closing in on me, stifling me, blinding me, hobbling my feet. All the windows about me were blank and black; a block and a half ahead of me was a blaze of light—Boldini's Saloon—"a rotten bad one," Denny had said.

I ran, oh, how I ran, but he ran, too, faster, faster. I tried to reach out for something to cling to—for a shield—Just fragments came—"angels charge over thee ... snare of the fowler ... terror by night...."

We were almost at Boldini's Saloon, and I couldn't run any faster, and twice he had caught hold of my arm.... Suddenly another fragment came—"in all thy ways ..." All! I ran through the swinging doors into the saloon, out of the horrid, dark night into the horrid light, and I stumbled and went down onto my knees and pulled myself up by the bar, and I heard my voice—"Men—men—Please—I was going to the drug store to telephone—a woman is sick—a baby—she's all alone there—and this man—this man—" I hung onto the edge of the bar and everything spun dizzily round with me, but I saw three men bolt through the door and fall upon him.

Michael Daragh, I suppose some day I can remember with horror how they beat him, but I can't now. I can't be sorry for him. I can't be anything but gloatingly glad. They were drunk, all of them, but when they finished with him they escorted me to the drug store, one on each side and one marching on before and banged up the night man and while I telephoned the doctor they waited for me, and then they took me home.

I wanted to scream with laughter—they couldn't walk straight, two of them—and I wanted more to cry,—"angels charge over thee—" They were! I shook hands with them and thanked them, and they mounted guard outside the house and I flew in to my lady.

Well, presently the doctor came, and then the nurse came, and then Roderick Frost III came, a frantic young man with penitent eyes, and presently Roderick Frost IV came, a bad-tempered young tenor who protested lustily at being born in a spot so far removed from his own rightful social orbit, and then morning came, and I fell into bed for three hours of sodden sleep.

Now the haughty chef from the Lake Shore Drive is here, taking royal charge, and Edna Miles' job is over. I'm going to see little Miss Marjorie and 'fess up, and take farewell of Mrs. Mussel and my kind S.F., and then, my dears, I'm coming home,—home with palms of victory.

Haven't I won, Emma Ellis? Haven't I won, Michael Daragh? Do you dare to count the one exception that gloriously proved the rule? Didn't my three unsteady angels more than make up for one poor devil? Nearly six weeks alone in the wide, cold world, dozens of kindly conductors and policemen and L guards and clerks and fellow citizens, the kind little floorwalker and Denny Dolan, and the beamish Buffalo and THE MAIDEN'S DREAM, and my three avenging knights!

Own up, old dears! Admit you're beaten! I have walked The Narrow Path and found it clean and safe and good!

Triumphantly—gloatingly—

JANE.



CHAPTER XV

It would be the private opinion of Emma Ellis to her dying day that Miss Vail had suppressed a good deal and had embellished a good deal, in that dramatic way of hers. She had written so much fiction and lived so much in her imagination that it was doubtful if she could (with the best intentions) tell the exact and unadorned truth about anything. Besides, even if things had happened exactly as she had chronicled them, it was not a fair test anyway; it was a very different case from those of the heroines in the two stories. Jane Vail knew she was Jane Vail, with an assured position in the literary world and a large income, and that the whole thing was only play-acting after all. But with Mr. Daragh entirely convinced and more maudlinly worshipful than ever, what was the use of saying anything? But she could think.

Jane swung happily into her fourth year in New York, flying home to Sarah Farraday for Christmas, meeting the young year with high hopes and canny plans, a definite part, now, of the confraternity of ink. Her circle widened and widened; important persons came down from their heights of achievement to make much of her, and the late spring saw the successful launching of another gay little play, and early fall found her deep—head, hands, and heart—in her first serious novel, but she found amazing margins of time for Rodney Harrison, for Hope House, for Michael Daragh.

Sarah Farraday, resigned but never reconciled, shared vicariously in the life-more-abundantly which had come to her best friend, and she always said, with a small sigh, that nothing Jane did or said could ever surprise her again, but she was nevertheless startled, after a long silence, to receive a fat letter bearing a Mexican stamp.

On a Meandering Train, bound, more or less for Guadalajara, it began, and was dated December the seventh.

SALLY DEAR,

You must be thinking me quite mad at last, not hearing from me for weeks, and then—this! Like the old woman in the fairy tale,—"Can this be I?"

I decided all in a wink to fly to California and visit my mother's cousins, the Budders. I needed a drastic change, Sally. I haven't had a real play-time for a year, and it's four years and a month since I left home for New York—can you realize it? Four lucky, beautiful, shining years. But oh, I'm tired, old dear! So tired that my brain creaks. I think there comes a time, in creative work, for playing hooky. Write and run away and live to write another day. So I wired the Budders I was coming and took the train the same day, and when I reached San Francisco I found them all packed up for this Mexican trip,—indeed, they were sitting on their trunks with a tentative ticket for me in their hands. And I was pleased pink to come. The Budders (doesn't Budder sowd as if I ad a code id by ed?) are nice, comfortable creatures,—the sort who are called the salt of the earth but in reality aren't anything so piquant. They're the boiled potatoes and graham bread and rice pudding. You, now, Sally darling, are the angel cake, and there's not half enough of you; I'm the olives and anchovies and caviar ... a little goes a long way ... and Michael Daragh is the rich and creamy milk of human kindness, always being skimmed by a needy, greedy world.

Behold me, then, ambling through Mexico, a Spanish phrase book in my lap and peace in my heart.

Adios!

JANE.

P.S. I have just read this over, Sarah. Fiction of purest ray serene. I'm not tired. I don't need to play. It was a very bad time for me to leave,—my work screamed after me all across the continent. I had to fly for my life and liberty.

Sally, friend of my youth, patient receptacle of all my moods and tenses, I was falling in love. At least, I felt myself slipping. All these four years I have intended Michael Daragh to be an interesting character part in my drama of New York, down in the cast as "her best friend." He is threatening to take the lead, and it isn't going to do at all. Sally, the man's goodness is simply ghastly; I couldn't endure having a husband so incontestibly better than I am. Why, you know that all my life I've been "a wonderful influence for good" with mankind! Didn't I always coax sling shots away from bad little boys and make them sign up for the S.P.C.A.? And wasn't I always getting bad big boys to smoke less and drink less and pass ex'es and dance with wallflowers and write to their mothers? Really, when I think of the twigs I've bent and the trees I've inclined, I feel that there should be a tablet erected to me somewhere. But the woman who weds Michael Daragh, I don't care who she is (lie: I care enormously!) will always be burning incense to him in her lesser soul, always straining on tiptoe to breathe the air in which he lives and moves and has his being.

Michael Daragh, that time he renounced the flesh-pots and "took to bride the Ladye Povertye with perfect blithenesse," did it so thoroughly that any literal spouse will be only a sort of morganatic wife, anyway. I don't mean that he might not adore her and be wonderful to her after he'd ministered unto a drove of sticky immigrants and a Settlement full of drab down-and-outs and an Agnes Chatterton Home full of Fallen Sisters, but he would really expect her to prefer having him assist at the arrival of the eleventh little Lascanowitz in a moldy cellar to keeping a birthday dinner date with her.

Now, Sally dear, in these four years since I left my village home (soft chords) I have labored somewhat, and I confess that I have frankly looked forward to matrimony as a sort of glorified vacation. I couldn't ever give up my work, of course,—it wouldn't give me up—and I don't crave to "sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam and live upon strawberries, sugar and cream" exclusively, but somewhere in the middle ground between that and washing dishes and "feeding the swine," I did visualize a sort of gracious lady leisure, with a vague, worshipful being in the background making me "take care of myself."

Therefore, feeling myself melting unduly on the Irish question, I fly while there is yet time.

Much love, old dear!

JANE.

December 8th.

That was a silly screed, yesterday, Sally dearest, but getting it off my chest was a great relief. And at that it wasn't a complete confession. There was another reason for a strategic retreat. The other reason was Rodney Harrison. Yes, the House of Harrison has capitulated, handsomely, lavishly, Mater and Pater as well, but I'm very sure that I can never be theirs. Just as I feel that Michael Daragh is too good for me, so do I feel that Rodney Harrison is not quite good enough! I mean by that not quite concerned enough with drying the world's tears. With—as G.B.S. says—"a character that needs looking after as much as my own," I feel I should have some one a little less Philistine than the cheerful Rodney. At any rate, I needed perspective on the whole situation, and who knows but I shall meet my nice new fate on this romantic pilgrimage? (Sounds more like eighteen than twenty-eight, doesn't it?) But, seriously, I've been so constantly with Michael Daragh and Rodney in these four years that I know every dip and spur, every line and leaf of their mental scenery; fresh fields and pastures new are what I need. And "one meets so many delightful people in traveling—" as witness the good Budders and their niece, Miss Vail ('sh ... they say she's a writer!)

Something, which is to say, somebody, may turn up at any moment.

Yours, Micawber-ing,

J.

P.S. I trust you won't expect to glean any useful information or statistics about Mexico from these chronicles? The Budders are deep in histories and guidebooks but I know not whether the Chichimecs were people or pottery and I hope I never shall!

P.S. II. Cousin Dudley, having just returned from the smoker, reports chatting with a most interesting young civil engineer——

December 9th.

We are now so late, Sally dear, that we have lost all social standing; we slink into sidings and wait in shame for prompt and proper trains to bustle by. But I don't mind. At this rate I shall be able to converse rippingly in Spanish by the time we reach Guadalajara. Cousin Dudley knows a professor person there who will help us to plan our trip.

Spanish is deliciously easy. It seems rather silly to make it a regular study in our schools.

I adore the stations, especially at night,—black velvet darkness studded with lanterns and torches and little leaping fires; old blind minstrels whining their ballads; the mournful voices of the sweetmeat venders chanting—"Dulce de Morelia!"—"Cajeta de Celaya!" These candies, by the way, are the most——

December 11th.

Alas, muy Sally mia, when I meant to add a few paragraphs to this letter diary every day! I was interrupted just there by Cousin Dudley who came in with his civil engineer, and there hasn't seemed to be any spare time since. (How is that for a demonstration of Mr. Burroughs' well-known theory about folding your hands and waiting and having your own come to you?)

He is an extremely civil engineer and very easy to look at. He has close-cropped, bronzy brown hair and gentian-blue eyes and his skin is burned to a glowing copper luster. He is just idling about, slaying time during a vacation too brief to warrant his going home to Virginia, and he shows strong symptoms of willingness to act as guide, philosopher and friend to wandering Touri. We are actually going to reach Guadalajara tomorrow! Some one must be giving us a tow.

Adios, muy amiga mia!

JUANA.

P.S. The C.E. is going to hear my Spanish lesson now.

P.S. II. Isn't NETZAHUALCOYOTL a cunning word?

Guadalajara, December 12th.

QUERIDA SARITA,

We sight-saw all morning in this lovely, languid, ladylike city, and this afternoon we called on Cousin Dudley's friend, Professor Morales and his family. They were expecting us and as our coche drew up at the curb, the door flew open and el profesor flew out, seized Cousin Ada's hand, held it high, and led her into the house, minuet fashion. The senora, a mountainous lady with a rather striking mustache and the bosom of her black gown sprinkled with a snow fall of powder which couldn't find even standing room on her face, conducted Cousin Dudley in the same manner, and I fell to the lot of a beautiful youth.

The sala was crazy with what-nots and knick-knacks and bamboo furniture and running over with people—plump, furrily powdered senoritas with young mustaches, cherubs with gazelle eyes and weak-coffee-colored skin, and the oldest woman ever seen out of a pyramid.

There was an agonizing time getting us all introduced and a still more agonizing time of stage wait afterward. Then Cousin Dudley (I thirsted for his gore) said chirpily, "My niece has learned to speak Spanish, you know."

My dear, it made the Tower of Babel seem like "going into the silence." Everybody in that room talked to me at once. In my frantic boast and foolish word about the easiness of Spanish it had never occurred to me that people would talk to me! If the fiends had only held their tongues and let me ask them to have the kindness to do me the favor to show me which way was the cathedral, or whether it was the silk handkerchief of the rich Frenchman which the young lady's old sick father required, all would have been well, but instead—a madhouse!

Then came rescue. The sweetest, softest pussy willow of a girl with a delicious accent said, "So deed I also feel, in the conevent, when they all at once spik ingles!" She was in pearl gray, no powder, no mustache, slim as a reed. Her gentle name is Maria de Guadalupe Rosalia Merced Castello, but they call her "Lupe" ("Loopie," Sally, not Loop!) She is a penniless orphan, just visiting her kin at present, but lives with an uncle in Guanajuato (where delves my C.E. at his mine) and she is in disgrace because of an undesirable love affair, so the senora told Cousin Ada. They are taking us to the Plaza to-night, and meanwhile we sup.

Delightedly,

JANE.

P.S. 11.30 P.M. The Plaza is still the parlor in Guadalajara and it's enchanting! The staid background of the chaperones in coches, the slow procession of youths and maidens, two and two, boys in one line, girls in another, the eager, forward looks, the whisper at passing, the note slipped from hand to hand, the backward glances, all classes, and over all, through all, the pleading, pulsing call of the music.

Sarah, never did you make melody like that, decent New Englander that you are! It's so poignantly searching-sweet, so sin verguenza (without shame!) El profesor had them play La Golondrina, their national anthem, really, which means merely The Swallow, to start with, but everything else a hungry heart can pack into it. Lupe and I walked together and she was pouring out her dewy young confidences before we'd been twice round the circle. Montagues and Capulets! The rich uncle who has reared her is the bitterest enemy of her Emilo's papa who is a general of revolutionary tendencies. "Me," she said with a shrug, "I can never marry! Vestire los santos!" (Which means, "I shall dress the saints!" Old maids having unlimited time for church work!)

Buenas noches,

J.

December 14th.

DEAREST SALLY,

The loveliest idea came and sat on my chest in the pearly dawn! I'm going to take Maria de Guadalupe Rosalia Merced Castello with me on this tour as Spanish teacher! She accepted with tears of joy and the Morales family bore up bravely. They will be frankly glad of a few nights' sleep,—Lupe's gallants come nightly to "make a serenade,"—not a lone guitar but the tenor from the opera house and a piano trundled through the streets. The more costly the musical ingredients, the greater the swain's devotion!

To-day we went with various members of the Morales clan to visit the Hospicio (see the Budders for dates and data!). I only remember a girl of twelve who sat by herself in the playground, the small, cameo, clear face with its sorrowing eyes, the pathetic arrogance in the lift of the chin, her withdrawal from the other noisy little orphans. I knew she must have a story, and when I asked the pretty sister in charge, she burst into eager narrative.

Twelve years ago, approximately, a young physician was called at night to the peon quarter, and to his amazement found that his patient was a lady, a girl whose patrician manner was proof against all her terror and suffering. She utterly refused to look at her child and threatened to smother it if he left it within her reach. He took it to the Hospicio to be cared for temporarily, and a few days later, going as usual to attend the young mother, he found her vanished. There was a lavish fee left for him, and a note, bidding him insolently to banish the whole matter from his memory. The neighbors knew only that they had heard a coche in the dead of night. The child, whom they named in their mournful fashion Dolores Tristeza—sorrows and sadness—was always the doctor's protegee. One day he came in great excitement to tell the pretty sister the sequel. He had been summoned the night before to the bedside of a dying man,—one of the great names of the city. The family was grouped about the father and among the weeping daughters he espied his mysterious patient! Afterward, when he was leaving, she looked him squarely in the eye and said, "You are a newcomer in Guadalajara? You must be, for I have never seen you before!" He told no one but the sister at the Hospicio and not even to her did he divulge the name, but two days later, in a lonely suburb of the city, he was shot and killed.

Sarah, doesn't that make your scalp creep? Dolores Tristeza! "Sorrows and Sadness!" I dashed out and bought her a gorgeous doll and she gave me a gracious smile but she was not at all overcome. She clearly feels her quality. Loads of people have wanted to adopt her but she would never go with them.

And to-morrow we are off to Queretaro to drop a silent tear on Maximilian's dressy little tomb, the Budders, Lupe, the C.E. and I. We are gathering as we roll!

Adios, querida mia!

J.

Queretaro.

I've paid proper tribute to that poor pawn of Empire who lived so poorly and who died so well, but the real zest of this journey is Lupe! Fresh every hour! Her mental processes are delicious. I was lamenting her frank delight in bull-fights and she said, "Oh, the firs' time I see horse keel,' I am ver' seek. Now they keel four, seven, eleven horse,' I like ver' moach!" When I tried to make her realize the enormity of her taste, she turned on me like a flash—"But you American girl, you go see you' brawther get keel' in football game!"

"Pussy willow," I said, "it's not a parallel case. Our brothers are free agents,—they adore doing it. They're toiling and sweating and praying for the chance—perhaps for years,—and they're heroes, and thousands are making the welkin ring with their names!"

She shrugged. "Oh—eef you care more for some ol' horse than you' brawther——"

The C.E. (although he could dispense with her society very cheerfully) helps me to understand her, and through her, Mexico, this sad, bad, pitiful, charming, lovable, hateful land!

Lupe's Emilio is by way of being a poet, it seems, and he has sent her a little song, which we have translated, and I put it into rhyme, and the C.E.—who has a very decorative voice indeed—hums it to a lonesome little tune distantly related to La Golondrina. Here it is:

"Thro' the uncolored years before I knew you My days were just a string of wooden beads; I told them dully off, a weary number ... The silly cares, the foolish little needs.

"But now and evermore, because I've known you, They've turned to precious pearls and limpid jade, Clear amethysts as deep as seas eternal, And heart's-blood rubies that will never fade.

"You never knew, and now you never will know; Some joys are given; mine were only lent. You see, I do not reckon years or distance; Somewhere I know you are; I am content.

"I do not need your pity or your presence To bridge the widening gulf of now and then; It is enough for me to know my jewels Can never turn to wooden beads again."

Of course, to be tiresomely exact, he's always known her, and she is entirely aware of his devotion, and he can reckon the time and distance quite easily with the aid of a time-table, but, as the C.E. says, "it listens well."

Off to La Ciudad de Mexico in the morning!

Con todo mi corazon,

JANE.

P.S. I might remark in passing that it's a perfectly good corazon again, sane and sound and whole, and summons only dimly a memory of New York....

Mexico City.

SARAH, my dear, I've given up trying to date my letters. I've lost count of time. We've been here for many golden days and silver nights, in a land of warm eyes and soft words, where peons take off their sombreros and step aside to let my Grace pass, and Murillo beggar boys are named—"Florentino Buenaventura, awaiting your commands!"

We sight-see so ardently that lazy little Lupe says she is "tired until her bones!" and when she surrenders, we go on alone, the C.E. and I. (Oh, yes, the Budders are still with us, but they are keener on facts than fancies, and we deign but seldom to go with them and improve our minds.) Yesterday, however, we consented to see Diaz' model prison. My dear, after seeing how the people live at large, one is convinced that here the wages of sin are sanitation and education. I should think ex-convicts would be hugely in demand for all sorts of positions. In the parlor we were fascinated with a display of the skulls of prisoners who had been executed there. I saw one small, round, innocent-looking one which couldn't possibly have ever contained a harsh thought, I was sure, and I indignantly read the tag to see what he had been martyred for. Sarah, the busy boy had done twenty-one ladies to death!

We listen to melting music in the Alameda, we ride in the fashion parade in the Calle San Francisco, we drive out along the beautiful Paseo de la Reforma and drink chocolate in the shadow of the Castle of Chapultepec—chocolate made with cinnamon and so rich and sweet it almost bends the spoon to stir it. Miss Vail remembers with difficulty that she is the heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time, a self-supporting young business woman who beats bright thoughts from a typewriter four earnest hours per diem ... or that she was....

Hoy—to-day, is very satisfying; I forget ayer—yesterday; Manana—to-morrow, may never come!

Juana.

Christmas Eve, Cuernavaca.

Felisces Pascuas, Sally dear! You in the snow and I in fairyland! It's a comic opera Christmas here, but a very fetching one,—the pretty processions of singing children through the streets, the gay, grotesque pinatis—huge paper dolls filled with dulces, the childish and merry little people, the color, the music, the smile and the sob of it all!

I wish I could have little Dolores Tristeza with me. I sent her a box of delights.

My pussy willow girl is star-eyed over a telegram and my much more than civil engineer has told me what he wants for Christmas. If he had told me on Fifth Avenue or at home, on Wetherby Ridge, I should have said at once that I was sorry, and I liked him immensely, and so on, but—but here, in Cuernavaca, in the Borda Gardens, beside the crumbling pinky palace, where the ghosts of Maximilian and Carlotta walk at the full of the moon, when he told me that all his days were wooden beads before I came, and—I don't know, Sally! I don't know! New York seems very far away ... Rodney Harrison and my St. Michael seem palely unreal.... Can it be possible, in these gay little weeks, that, as Lupe would say, "I have arrive'" to love this boy?

Distractedly,

JANE.



CHAPTER XVI

Orizaba.

MY DEAR SALLY,

In the market place to-day I found such a bored old bear dancing for a bored crowd. I've never seen anything quite so tired and patient as his eyes. His little old master was half asleep but he whacked his tambourine and whined his mournful song without a pause. I left Lupe and the C.E. and went out and patted the bear and asked the man (I am as handy as that with my Spanish!) how much he earned in a day. Less than fifteen cents in our money! Well, I asked him if I could buy the bear a week's vacation if I paid him three weeks' earnings in advance. He accepted thankfully and I believe he will keep his word, being just as bored as the bear. The old beast came down on his four feet with a gusty sigh and they padded peacefully away. The crowd thought me mildly mad and the C.E. was a little annoyed with me. He said he would gladly have attended to it for me if I had asked him. I answered him very impertinently—something Lupe had taught me—"Cuando tu vas, ya yo vengo!" which means in crude English, "By the time you get started I'll be on the way back!"

I purr with pleasure when I think of the bear!

JANE.

P.S. One hopes it isn't a habit with him ... being a little annoyed....

Cordoba.

Sally, dear, this isn't a comic opera country at all, but a land of grim melodrama; stark tragedy.

We're here in the prettiest city, on the edge of the tierra caliente, but it's been a horrid day. It started wrong. An unsavory but beautiful cherub of eight or so, smoking a cigarette, tried to sell me a baby lizard. You remember how I've always loved lizards, but I couldn't take it on a day's sight-seeing so I gave him a copper and refused. He said in liquid Spanish, "So, Your Grace will not buy my little lizard? Very well! Behold!"—and before my horrified eyes he held it to his cigarette and burned it to death before I could jump out of the machine and get to him. I suppose I'm tired out with all this rushing about, for I just went to pieces over it, and when Lupe said sympathetically, "Oh, deed you want it?" it made me turn on her. I made the rest go on the drive without me and I sat down in the Plaza alone to think things over. There was a little old fountain with a gurgling drip, and I rested in the ragged shade of the banana trees and heard two hours tinkled from the crumbling, creamy-colored cathedral, and came gradually to the point of understanding that the boy was just as much an object of pity as the lizard. I knew that Michael Daragh would say—there—that's the first time, even to myself——

Well, I sat there, cooled and calmed, and presently I heard something and looked up to see two soldiers on horseback bringing a prisoner. His arms were bound behind him, and great, rough ropes ran from their saddles to his neck and the skin was rubbed raw. The horses were steaming; they must have come fast. Another soldier went on to report or something and told them to wait there, and they were halted right by me. The man's mouth was open and his swollen tongue hanging out and he was panting just like a dog. He gasped, "Agua! Por Dios—agua!" but his guards just laughed and shouted to the pulqueria across the street, and a boy came out and brought them drinks. Their backs were toward me, and I got up without making a sound and crept to the fountain and filled the big iron cup to the brim and held it till he'd drained every drop, and then let him have a little more, and then I dipped my handkerchief in the water and put it in his mouth. And just at that very moment—of course!—the guards turned round and saw me, and the Budders and the C.E. and Lupe drove up!

My dear Sarah, they very nearly arrested me! The man is, they claim, a dangerous revolutionist, and I was giving aid to him. Lupe was shaking like a leaf and the C.E. was white as paper, but between them they got me off.

I don't care! I'd do it again!

It seems the whole country is simmering and seething in revolution; old Diaz' throne is tottering under him. Lupe was tearful over a wailing letter from her Emilio, begging her to return, and the C.E. is recalled to his mine, and the Budders are a little nervous and anxious to hurry northward, so we're off for Guanajuato to-morrow, but I'm not very keen about it.

I'm not very keen about anything.

Drearily,

J.

Two Hours Later.

P.S. We took a little paseo in the moonlight and things looked brighter in the dark! The only reason the C.E. gets a little annoyed is that he cannot bear to see me in distress or danger. He was very nice about promising to help me smooth the path for Romeo and Juliet.

We pass through Guadalajara and I'll run in to see Dolores Tristeza.

J.

On the Train to Guanajuato.

Sally, she came running to meet me and flung herself into my arms! The sister says she's never done that to any one before, and she told me the child had talked of me constantly. They're going to let me take her out for a whole day when we come back. She called "Hasta la vista!"—and threw me a kiss. She has quite wiped out the lizard and the insurrecto.

Later.

This is the most fascinating place yet! I'm glad the C.E. lives here, rather than in the cloying prettiness of the tierra caliente. It's great fun, arriving at a new place after dark. The town is high in the hills above the station and we came up in a mule car, rattling through the twisting, narrow streets. I sat near the driver, only his soft, bright eyes showing between his high-wrapped serape and his low-drawn sombrero, and he told me that his mules were named Constantino and The Pine Tree, faithful animals both of whom he tenderly loved. The few pedestrians scuttled into doorways or flattened themselves against the walls as we caromed past, and from time to time he blew a deafening blast on a crumpled horn.

We stepped from the car straight into the office of the hotel, and then the C.E. and I set out with Lupe to escort her to her uncle's house, but at the first dark turning she gave a smothered little scream and melted into the arms of a dusky cavalier. Emilio, when he could spare the time to be introduced, proved something of a landscape,—large for a Mexican, very much the patrician with his slim hands and feet and correct Castilian manner. Guanajuato is rather old-fashioned and he wears the high class, native costume, and when Lupe is at home here, she always wears a reboso instead of a hat.

He is the son of so many revolutions, it must make him dizzy to remember them, but I like him and I mean to help him win his pearl maiden. He discreetly left us before we reached Lupe's house and delivered her over to a very impressive Blue-beardish sort of person who was very gracious to us and asked me to visit Lupe. I shall,—it fits in perfectly with my plans! I go there to-morrow.

Meanwhile, I go to sleep!

Drowsily,

JANE.

At Senor Don Diego's Palacio.

Sally, mia, how you'd adore this house! The floors are of dull-red tiles and they are massaged three times a day, and the whole thing is medieval in flavor,—a flock of velvet-voiced, dove-eyed servants who adore Lupe and are pledged to her cause. Old Cristina, who was her mother's nurse, is to be our stoutest ally.

Every night for an hour Emilio stands under her balcony "playing the bear." Lupe, her face shrouded in her reboso, leans over and whispers. I hover in the background like Juliet's nurse. Afterward the C.E., having ridden in from his mine, comes for me, and we sally forth in the night like the Caliph and walk slowly up and down the Street of Sad Children, where the music comes daintily to us, filtered through the trees. Sometimes "Emily," as the C.E. wickedly calls him, joins us, to talk of his two loves,—Lupe, and Mexico. Sally, never laugh again at the Mexican revolutions,—they're not funny, only pitiful.

My chief task now is to infuse a quality of hope and—ginger—into these little lovers. Sometimes their attitude of Dios no lo quiso—heaven wills otherwise—makes me want to shake them, but slowly and surely I'm rousing them to action.

To-day we visited the prison here ... not the show model of Mexico City. This one is a hold-over from the Dark Ages. Young and old, gentle and simple, murderers and thieving children—all herded in together. In the huge court, before pillars with chains, a peon was mopping up some dark stains.... Ugh! This is the broken heart of Mexico where tears and blood are brewing.

JANE.

One Momentous Morning!

All our little plans are perfected, Sally! We have to act quickly for Lupe's Tio Diego is more irate than usual, and "Emily's" papa languishes in prison, and there is a plot on foot to rescue him and make him Governor or something.

The Budders find the situation singularly lacking in thrill, and feel they would enjoy the safe and uneventful streets of San Francisco, and we start north day after to-morrow night. They are interested in my pretty novios and will timidly help us.

It is all very simple. In the afternoon Lupe and I will stroll to the little church where she was baptized and where the gentle old priest is a friend of "Emily's" family. Emilio and the C.E. will be waiting. Two of us are expeditiously wed. Lupe and I stroll back alone, halting to take a cup of chocolate with cinnamon in the dulceria; dine sedately with Tio Diego. Then I, reminding him that I am about to return to the States with my relatives, take farewell of him, thanking him (feeling a good deal of the viper that bites the hand that feeds it) for his hospitality. Lupe and I then repair to her rooms for a last chat. Presently Emilio and the C.E. arrive beneath the balcony. I emerge, join the C.E., and go briskly with him through the dusk to the street car and thence to the station where the Budders are waiting and leave for Silao on the nine-o'clock train.

Only, as the intelligent reader will have gathered, it will be Lupe who melts into the distance in my frock and cloak, with my thickest chiffon veil over her face, and Emilio who strides at her side in the C.E.'s suit and overcoat and hat and the big, dark goggles he's been diligently wearing lately, and a scarf about his neck against the menace of the night air, while the C.E. in actuality, in caballero costume, gazes adoringly up at me on Lupe's Juliet balcony! Rather neat, what?

We hold the pose, the C.E. and I, until we hear the heartening whistle of the train, when he slips away to change his clothes and I, escorted by old Cristina, go back to the hotel and follow the Budders to Guadalajara in the morning. I don't see how it can possibly fail.

Emilio's family owns large ranchos up in Durango, where the elopers will be quite safe in a mountain fastness, and they will arrive there by craft, not buying through tickets, doubling now and then.

This is much more fun than eloping myself!

Excitedly,

JANE.

P.S. Speaking of which, the C.E. thinks it high time his case came up for hearing, and I've promised to give it serious consideration as soon as E. and L. are on their train. He had a quaint idea that the old priest might as well make it a double wedding!

The Next Night.

Only think, Sally dear, this time to-morrow night it will all be accomplished! I've never been so thrilled in all my days.

And there's another reason for it beside my pussy willow maid's romance! (No, not that! Not yet, at any rate!) It was this evening, early, when she and I were walking, and they were playing La Golondrina. Lupe was silent, deep in her own rosy thoughts. We passed the entrance to the "Street of Sad Children" and the name and the mournful magic of the music conjured up Dolores Tristeza for me, and the thought that I should soon see her again, but only to say good-by.

Then, quite suddenly and serenely, with no bothering doubts or "if's," I knew. I knew the thing I am going to do. I'm going to take her, to have her and keep her always. I'm twenty-eight years old, sound body and sane mind, with a steadily fattening income; I defy them to say I'm not the fittest adopter they ever saw. I know she'll want to come with me, and I know I couldn't leave Mexico heart-whole without her. Just as I arrived at this satisfying conclusion I glanced up; we were passing a little pulqueria whose name—painted gorgeously—was "The Orphan's Tear!" Wasn't that fitting?

I can't wait to see her and tell her!

JANE.

The Afternoon.

SALLY DEAREST,

We are just home from the wedding and I wish you could see Lupe's dewy-eyed joy. I ache with tenderness for her. I know now why mothers always weep at weddings—I very nearly did myself, and I know I shall in ten years or so, when I see my Dolores Tristeza, standing like that, star-eyed, quivering-lipped.

When she slips away in the dusk to-night I shall put a period to my thought of Maria de Guadalupe Rosalia Merced Castello. I want to keep this fragrant memory of her.

"Yet, ah, that spring should vanish with the rose! That youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close!"

I refuse to fancy my pussy-willow girl, my pearl maiden, in ten years, with a mustache and no corsets and eight weak-coffee-colored babies! Adios, Lupe mia! Go with God!

Everything is in readiness. The dear old Budders, trembling with excitement, will be waiting at the train. As for me—as for my own little affair—I'm pushing that away, until my novios are safe. I'm pushing away that moment on the balcony, when we hear the train whistle. Sally, I don't know! This lovely, lazy, ardent land works moon magic on staid professional women!

Mistily,

JANE.

Guadalajara, Two Days Later.

SALLY DEAREST,

It was mean to make you wait for the next thrilling installment of my Mexican best-seller, but this is the first moment when I've thought I could put down, coherently and cohesively, what happened. Happened is a palely inadequate word;—burst,—exploded—erupted, would be better!

It worked like a charm. They got away. I leaned from Lupe's balcony in the fragrant dusk and listened to their footfalls dying away. The C.E., shrouded to his eyes, looked up and whispered that "Emily's" charro trousers had nearly ruined everything at the last moment; he had needed vaseline and a shoehorn and a special supplication to St. James to get them on. We giggled like sixteen-year-olds. The C.E. said—

"Lettice, Lettice, let down your golden hair, That I may climb by a golden stair!"

I was so pleased with him for remembering his fairy-tales. I was so pleased with him and so fond of him and so happy over my novios that I couldn't keep my beautiful plan a secret any longer. I told him what I had decided about Dolores Tristeza.

My dear! I wish you could have heard him! He was another person entirely. He said it was the maddest, wildest, most sickly sentimental, impractical thing he'd ever heard! He raved on and on, always coming back to the point of her clouded parentage. I told him he was perfectly mid-Victorian,—that any one living in the present century knows that there are no illegitimate children—just illegitimate fathers and mothers! But it never budged him. He was, for the first time, a most uncivil engineer. "Besides," I said, "beauty and wit is the love child's portion!"

It must have been funny, really, raging at each other in whispers. He began to burble about heredity and I told him I was planning an environment that would bleach out the heredity of the Piper Family, and he said that it couldn't be done, and I said that he was a pagan-suckled-in-a-creed-outworn, and just then the train whistled—the signal for what was to have been our melting moment, and we were both so mad we were fairly jibbering! And at that very instant old Cristina came running to tell us to fly at once, as Don Diego had decided to have Emilio arrested!

Before we could spread a wing, a little guard of opera bouffe soldiers was rounding the corner. I just whispered—"Stick! They'd stop them at Silao!" when they were upon him. He was a brick, I must admit. He just hitched the serape higher and pulled the sombrero lower and trudged away in somber silence. It seemed the only decent and sporting thing for me to stick, too, so I flung on Lupe's cape and covered my face with a mantilla and fled after them. The C.E. was furious and tried his frantic best to make me go back, but I wouldn't and I whispered to him that I'd never forgive him as long as I lived if he told and spoiled everything. My dear, they took us to that horrible prison ... with the bloodstains on the floor! The man at the desk was nearly asleep. He scribbled something in his Dream Book and produced a key three feet long at least, unlocked a door, pushed us in, and clanged it shut behind us. We were in the main court with the murderers and the newsboys and the sodden drunkards.... A guard with a gun showed us two cells opening off the court. We crouched on stools in the back of one of them and the C.E. said between his teeth, "Keep that thing over your face and keep still!"

Then I stopped admiring myself and realized what I had done and where I was ... a Gringo woman in a Guanajuato prison at night.... But every hour that I stayed there saw my novios nearer to safety, and the Budders wouldn't know and wouldn't worry. Sally, I'm glad I had a firm Vermont Scriptural upbringing! I can always find something, ready to my hand,—a staff to lean on. I thought of a funny one I've always loved—one of the Proverbs, I think——

"The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous runneth into it and is safe."

I wasn't very sure I was "a righteous" but I tried valiantly to remember all the worthy actions I had done, and I don't mind telling you they rather piled up,—from Lupe to the bored old bear. I runneth-ed into my tower and felt a good deal safer, I make no doubt, than my poor C.E.

There was a nameless age of black silence, and then there was a crowded hour of glorious life. When I heard the shouts and then the shots I tried to remember Sydney Carton and the French aristocrats taking snuff on the steps of the guillotine, and I tried to think of something handsome and dressy in the way of a farewell speech, in case it might ever be reported in the States. The C.E. was splendid, only, when the great doors clanged open and the mob streamed in calling wildly for Emilio Hernandez, he very naturally failed to hold up his hand and say "Present." We both thought that his hour had struck and you may imagine my horror and remorse. Well, they began a cell-to-cell canvass, but when they flashed the lantern on us they shouted with joyful triumph. They were not executioners but rescuers! They were revolutionists, come to save Emilio and his papa, the General. That gentleman arrived on the run, panting, demanding his son. Alarums and excursions! Explanations. I think the bitterest moment of the whole hideous time for the poor C.E. was when "Emily's" papa kissed him!

Sally, I'm running down like a mechanical toy,—I can hardly write another word. I was escorted to my hotel and thence to a dawn train for Guadalajara. The meek C.E. renewed his suit; he said I could adopt the whole hospicio if I wanted to, but I said "Adios" and I think in his head, if not his heart, he was rather relieved. Poor, dear, extremely civil engineer! His tastes are simple and his wants are few,—just a limp, lovely lady in the background of his life, waiting prettily for him to come home and tell her what to think. That man doesn't want a help-meet; he wants a harim.

They are unwinding several thousand miles of red tape, but at the end, like the pot of gold and the rainbow, I shall find my Dolores Tristeza, and there will be one pair of mournful eyes the less in this land of smiles and sobs.

Adios, poor, pretty, passionate, shrugging Mexico! Go with God!

I'm coming home, Sally mia!

J.

P.S. The C.E.'s days before he knew me were just a string of wooden beads; afterward, they were a string of fire-crackers!

P.S. II. Michael Daragh is going to be frightfully pleased with me for wiping the orphan's tear; but he'll make me see that there's just as much poetry and more punch in wiping the orphan's nose!



CHAPTER XVII

Once, long ago, coming home from her self-imposed exile to the lean, clean Island in Maine, Jane had dreaded, a little, her re-meeting with Michael Daragh, but on the trip home from Mexico and California she had no such feeling. Doubts were over and done with forever. The flight had been for the purpose of getting perspective; perspective made her grave Irishman, her stern St. Michael, loom up and up until he filled her horizon. Her heart had been allowed to drift with the tide in the lyrical interlude in the lovely, lazy land she had come from, but—save perhaps for certain misty moments—it had insisted on swimming stoutly upstream. "I am going back to Michael Daragh," she told herself gladly and unashamed, and the rhythm of the train, hurrying across the continent, repeated it in a joyful, endless litany—"Going—back—to—Michael—Daragh!"

Jane leaned back in her quiet compartment (tangible evidence of solid success) and watched the desert miles and the prairie miles sliding away beside her, and warmed her heart and soul with the thought of Michael's face when he should first see her again. Now, when the swift gladness leapt up in his eyes and the color ran up in his thin cheeks and his whole face glowed from within with its stained-glass-window look, she would not turn away from him, but to him,—gladly, royally, lavishly, with all that she had and all that she was.

She wired Mrs. Hills from Chicago the day but not the hour of her return, but sent no word to Michael Daragh. That would savor of a command, a summons, and she was too happily humble for that. He would know from the boarding-house keeper that she was near, and he would be waiting for her.

Like a timid tourist, she was hatted and veiled and gloved long before they entered the grimy outskirts of the city, and sat, hot-cheeked, breathing fast, on the edge of her seat, far more thrilled and shaken than she had been, four years and more ago, when she made her exodus from the village to the wide world. The narrow strip of mirror between the windows framed her radiant face; now indeed was she anointed with the oil of joy above her fellows.

Between a slight delay of the train, and the snail's pace of the taxicab through the traffic, it would be quite six o'clock before she reached Mrs. Hetty Hills' house in Washington Square; he would be absolutely certain to be home.

Everything took on an especial beauty and significance,—the crowded streets, the shop windows, the lights, the people,—her heart went out to all of them—rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; they were Michael's and they would be hers. He should have that oil of joy for his work, for his high, selfless purposes.

It was hard to wait even an instant to see him, to have him ask, and to answer, but it was wonderful to wait, in faith and utter confidence. The sense of haste and impatience fell away; it must happen as it would, serenely, naturally.

She did not mind that it took her many seconds to find the exact amount and then a lavish tip for her driver, and she noted with satisfaction that the faithful Mabel had seen her from an upper window and would spread the glad tidings.

Mrs. Hetty Hills, a little stouter and grayer and more prosperous than she had been four years earlier, stood in the doorway. "Well, now, I am glad!" she declared. "I'm free to say I thought it was a risk, your traipsing round Mexico with all those revolutions and epidemics and things! My, but you look fine, child! I believe my soul it's done you a world of good! 'Praise to the face is open disgrace,' but you don't look a day over eighteen and I'd swear it on a stack of Bibles!"

"Nice Mrs. Hills," said her star boarder, hugging her heartily. "How are you? And how is everybody?"

"Well, I'm pretty good now," said the ex-villager, earnestly, "but you can tell your folks I was miserable enough a week ago yesterday. I guess if I was the give-up kind I'd have been flat on my back. I don't know when I've ever had such a spell. My throat ached and I could hardly drag one foot after another, and even my eyeballs——"

"But you're fine now, aren't you? I'm so glad! I'm sure you'd been overdoing. And how is—how are all the others?"

"Oh ... about the same. Mrs. Ramsey doesn't get out to her concerts any more, on account of her leg, and that makes her bluer'n a whetstone, but otherwise I guess we're all pretty much of a muchness. Everybody misses—land t' goodness," she caught herself up, "I guess there is one piece of news! I guess there is one change, sure enough!"

"What?" asked Jane, sitting down suddenly on one of the stiff hall chairs.

"Why, Mr. Daragh! He's gone home to Ireland!"

("You've got to say something! You've got to make a remark!") Jane told herself, fiercely, but it seemed a fearful pause before she heard her voice and it sounded thin and queer. "Oh, is that so? Has he?"

"Yes, went off like a shot! Got a cable from some of his folks. All he said was he was called home. Awful close-mouthed for an Irishman. All the Irish I ever knew before—I think he gave Mabel a note to put in your room. Want I should send her up for it?" asked the landlady eagerly.

"No, thanks," said Jane, very creditably. "There isn't any hurry. And how is Emma Ellis, Mrs. Hills?" She sat chatting for ten minutes by her wrist watch and then took her leisurely way upstairs and then she chatted another five with Mabel before she attacked the mile of mail upon the desk in her sitting room.

It was a brief little note; illness and imminent death in his family—he had time for this line only—and he wanted God to save her kindly and he was her friend, Michael Daragh. It was the sort of little note, she told herself, that a thoughtful man would write with the good Mabel in the back of his mind. She felt a sense of daze and dizziness and she sat with her hat and cloak on until the dinner gong rent the air, waiting much as Michael Daragh had waited, long ago, when he had listened for the sound of the motor, bearing her uptown with Rodney Harrison, and then had torn up the narrow strip of paper which bore her foolish little postscript. She took herself resolutely in hand and went briskly down to dinner, and regaled Mrs. Hills and the music students and the teachers and bank clerks and elderly, concert-going ladies (one of whom went no more) with the gay but expurgated text of her conquest of Mexico. There was talk of Michael Daragh, and one of the younger music students ventured, pinkly, the theory that Mr. Daragh had been called home to inherit a title.

"Yes," said Jane with quick sympathy, "I shouldn't wonder in the least! He's always seemed a belted earl sort of person, for all his other-worldly ways, hasn't he?" It was a relief to talk of him lightly and easily like this. "Or a Squire, at any rate! Something picturesque,—something story bookish!"

"Oh," giggled the music student, delighted at her backing, "won't it be thrilling to get a letter with a crest and be told that he'll never be back again?"

"Lord Lovel, he stood at his castle gate, A-combing his milk-white steed,——"

chanted Jane, merrily. "I can quite picture him, can't you? Only the milk-white steed will be immediately hitched to a delivery wagon of his worldly goods, for distribution to the poor. Yes, that is without doubt what has happened! I can see adoring yokels pulling their forelocks to him! He'll fit beautifully into that background!" Thus her tongue, running ripplingly on, while her heart, suddenly released from its numb depression, wired her blithe reassurance. "He's coming back,—coming back to me—coming back soon!"