The high mood stayed with her, even though the days and weeks slipped by without word from him. She was entirely happy and confident, but she found herself too restless to settle down to her work. She had a sense of excited waiting for something beautiful to happen, and a warm and kindly yearning to make every one else as happy as herself. She went often to Hope House and sparred with Emma Ellis; neither of them had heard from the Irishman, and while Jane was secretly able to interpret this with comfort to herself, the other was not. Miss Ellis leaned romantically toward the theory of the younger music student; Mr. Daragh had probably gone home to inherit property and assume responsibilities; she had always known there was nothing ordinary about Mr. Daragh; she had always felt that he was a great person, stooping to this life of abnegation.

"But I think," said Jane flippantly, "he's much more likely to have been a Sin-eater!"

"A—what?"

"A Sin-eater. I'm sure they're still being worn in Ireland. A Sin-eater is a man who has had a great sorrow or committed a great crime——"

"Miss Vail!"

"—and lives in a damp and dismal cave across a slimy moor and whenever any one dies unshriven, he is sent for, and he comes after dark, his face shrouded, and prays and moans all night beside the corpse, eating all he possibly can of the food which has been placed about it, and what he can't consume on the spot he takes away before dawn, in a sack, and that is his larder, you see, until the next sudden death! And, of course, the idea is that he has taken the sins of the departed upon his own soul, and that when he has done it long enough and meekly enough he will be permitted to die, himself, and other people's sins will have miraculously cleansed him of his own!"

"I never heard anything so—so revolting," said the Superintendent in her most smothered voice.

"Oh, do you find it so? To me it seems very quaint and charming." She was ashamed of her small-boy impishness but for sheer high spirits she could not seem to stop. "But perhaps," she allowed it grudgingly, "he didn't commit a crime; perhaps he was merely crossed in love, or—likeliest of all—assumed the burden of another's misdeed! A wild young brother, or The Heir! That's it,—The Heir! And Michael, with proper younger-son humility, realized that he didn't count, and took the blame and fled to the States, and now The Heir has died, first doing the decent thing in the way of death-bed remorse and confession. And, of course, there's a girl in it somewhere, and I'm sure she has waited for Michael all these years instead of marrying The Heir, aren't you?"

But for the most part her mood was one of amazing gentleness and serenity, with that insistent desire for being good enough and worthy enough for the glory about to descend upon her. She made little pilgrimages to all the people they had helped together,—to Ethel and Jerry and Billiken in Rochester, snugly prosperous and happy, with a little Jerry, now, whose ears flanged exactly as his father's did; to Chicago, to confer with little Miss Marjorie and the Roderick Frosts about the making of the old house where Roderick IV was born into a Maternity Home, and to gladden the good little Stranger's Friend with a fat check for her work, and to puncture Mrs. Mussel's gloom with substantial gifts and the bright and bonny refurnishing of the Christian room for girls such as Edna Miles pretended to be; to catch up with the girl who had taken her "CROWDED HOUR" to success, always on tour now, in one of her playlets, and married to the brother of "BROTHER" ("BROTHER" himself having given up and gone to make the long fight on the desert). She went, fur-bundled and red-cheeked, to spend a week-end with Deacon Gillespie and "Angerleek" at Three Meadows, and found one of the daughters at home, and the old man told her that two of the sons were coming for their summer vacations. Angelique was animated with timid cheer; he'd been different, gentler, since Danny....

Jane went back to New York with June in her heart. Was not this a part of her life with Michael since he had sent her to that lean, clean island to snare back her soul? This was part of the harvest they had sown together, for everything she had done since coming to know him had been shared with him. There came a moment, of course, when her sense of sanctification broke like a bubble. "I feel like the Elsie Books," she said, grinning her boy's grin at herself. "I'd better go home and let Mrs. Wetherby put me in my place!"

But even in her Vermont village she found balm. They might hold, with Mrs. Hills, that "Praise to the face is open disgrace," and be chary of effusions, but Jane Vail was the brightest jewel in their crown, and it was only the deafest and dimmest old ladies who asked her if she was still going on with her literary work.

Mrs. Wetherby, although she would never forgive Jane to her dying day, was clearly thankful to have Martin all to herself. She fed him to repletion and washed and ironed his silk shirts with her own hands, and she loved to say at meetings of The Ladies' Aid or The Tuesday Club, "Well, Marty says his mother's his girl!" Martin himself was heavily cheerful; he could see that Edward R. Hunter was pretty much tied down. It would not be very long, now, before there was no "Asst." in front of the "Cashier" on his door at the bank.

The Hunters had now what the humorist, Edward R., called "almost three children," and they were building on a new nursery which would be, without doubt, a hot, pink one. They had a little way of saying, "What have you been writing lately, Janey?" which conveyed, pleasantly but unmistakably, that people with their full and busy lives could not be expected to keep up with all the lighter current literature. Sarah Farraday, her earnest, blonde face a little lined and sharpened, had more piano pupils than she could possibly manage; two of her older girls were taking the beginners for her, and there was a recital almost every month in the burlapped studio where once the chubby driving horses had been housed. And in the old, elm-shaded house where the middle-aged maid still held sway, and where Aunt Lydia Vail had lived and died in her plump and pleasant creed, Jane and Sarah spent the night together, and this time there was no sprightly talk of Michael Daragh or Rodney Harrison and no pungent comparisons of them and their feelings for her; she was not talking now, the nimble-tongued Miss Vail, but the friend of her youth looked long at her glowing face, her deeply joyful eyes, and wondered, and sighed a little, and went back to talk of her most brilliant pupils and the worrying way her mother had of taking hard colds and keeping them....

Jane came away from her village with an entirely clear conscience; no one needed her there. She was her own woman, without let or hindrance, with a shining sense of good work and good works she could wait for the joy which was coming as certainly as the morning.

Then she came in late, one evening, to find Michael Daragh at the dinner table, a little browned and warmed from good sea air, and Emma Ellis was there—Mrs. Hills having telephoned and asked her to come to dinner and welcome home the wanderer—and at once the old life, the old routine, the old world, seemed to open and swallow him completely.

Lying wide-eyed in the dark, hours later, Jane told herself that even in the midst of the watching boarders his look and word for her had been filled with meaning; that it was inevitable that he should take Emma Ellis home to Hope House; that there had been no opportunity to ask her to wait up for him; that she had done the only possible thing in taking a bright and cheery leave of Mrs. Hills and coming up to her rooms. She had waited an hour in her sitting room—Michael Daragh had often dropped in for a chat before she went to Mexico—but when at last she heard his feet upon the stairs, they had carried him steadily on and up to his own floor.

And the next day and the day after that she told herself that it was perfectly natural for Hope House and Agnes Chatterton and kindred calls to fill his every hour. She was waiting happily and surely, and a special delivery letter from Rodney Harrison hardly registered on her consciousness when Mabel brought it up to her one afternoon. It was a brief letter, turgid, almost fierce in its tone. Rodney Harrison was not going to be put off any longer, it appeared. He would meet Jane at the theater that evening (where she must go to pass upon the performance of a new character-man in her second gay little play) and then she was going to supper with him, and to drive in his new speedster, and to make up her mind—no, not that, he'd made it up for her, once and for all—but to settle this matter definitely and right. She read it with an indulgent smile and put it down on her desk. Good old Rodney ... good old man-she-met-on-the-boat....

Her telephone rang at her elbow. She had had a soft little sleigh bell substituted for the harsh, commercial clang and even the most utilitarian call took on a tone of revelry, but now it had an especially gay and lilting sound, she thought. Michael Daragh's voice over the wire lacked its usual quality of serenity; he sounded unsure of himself; almost—shy, and Jane's grip on the receiver grew taut and her cheeks flamed.

"It's the way I'm asking you something now I've never dared ask you before, Jane Vail," purled the brogue, "and I'm wondering, dare I?"

"I—I'm wondering, too," said Jane.

"'Tis nothing at all you might be thinking it is! Ever since I'm back I've been screwing up my courage—but 'tis the boldest and brazenest thing my like would ever be daring to ask the likes of you!" She had never heard him talk so like a stage Irishman before; she had never known him so moved. "Whiles I'm thinking you'll say me 'yes,' and whiles I'm thinking you'll say me 'no' and whiles I'm destroyed entirely with the doubt! I'll be there inside the hour, or a half-hour itself, and let you be merciful, Jane Vail!"

"I will be waiting," she said, "and I will be merciful."

"God love you!" he cried and hung up abruptly.

She rose from her chair and stood in the middle of her clever orange and black room, icy hands clamped tightly to her burning cheeks. So! Journeys' end! She flew into the other room and with unsteady fingers divested herself of her severely smart business dress and flung a creamy cloud over her head. She justified this costume vigorously to herself. It was five o'clock—almost evening—and she wanted him to see her thus, he who had hardly ever seen her in other than the bread-and-butter garb of every day, but when she looked in the glass she shook her head. If he had at last dared to ask her to leave her sunny fields for his shadowed paths, was this the vision to reassure him?

She put on a mellow velvet of deepest brown, cunningly cut, and she had the satisfaction of knowing that it made her look like a young queen in an old frieze, but not, it was to be admitted, like a durable help-meet for a Settlement worker.

Her windows were wide to the tentative advances of spring and now she heard a ringing tread upon the pavement below, and with breathless haste she pulled off her regal raiment and flung herself into the primmest and plainest of her work frocks—a stern little brown serge with Puritan collar and cuffs, and this time she nodded approval at her reflection. Here was, indeed, a creature for human nature's daily food!

She heard his feet upon the stairs, his knuckles on the door of her sitting room, but she waited for a last long look. When she looked into that mirror again, she would see the glorified, glad face of Michael Daragh's love.



CHAPTER XVIII

The big Irishman was pulling burdened breaths and haste had flushed his lean cheeks, and they faced each other for an instant in silence before he caught her hands in a hard clutch. "I will be swift," he said, "the way the courage won't be oozing out of me!"

"Yes, Michael Daragh!" She stood up straight and proud before him, waiting for his word. She had waited long for it, turning her back alike on prosperous, opulent love and busy and purposeful spinsterhood, knowing that happiness for her was the grave, young saint whose chief concern would be always for the world's woe. Richly dowered though she was in body and brain, fit for a man's whole devotion, she would be content to share him with the submerged, with the besmirched and befouled of the earth. And at last he was speaking.

"Many's the bold boon I've begged, but never the like of this," he said, his gray eyes holding hers, "but never the like of this! Would you—could you—be dining with a dope fiend?"

It seemed a long time to Jane before she worked her hands free of his clasp and heard her voice, "I—don't believe I understand——"

"Why would you, indeed?" he cried, penitently. "Let you sit down till I'm telling you."

She seated herself in her straight desk chair, and—"Dining with a dope fiend," she heard herself saying. "It sounds rather like a line from a comic song, doesn't it?"

"A lad he is, just," said Daragh, earnestly. "It got hold of him after a sickness in the smooth devil's way it has. Six months, now, I'm toiling with him. Times I have him on his feet, times he's destroyed again. 'Twas a terrible pity I had to be leaving him the while I was home in Ireland. Well, I found him doing rare and fine, God love him, back at his drawing again in the scrap of a studio I found for him, but a pitiful tangle of nerves and fancies. What he needs now is a friend—his own sort—some one that speaks his own tongue. He thinks the decent world will have none of him,—a weak, pitiful thing isn't worth the saving. Fair perished with the lonesomeness, he is. 'I used to know women,' he was telling me, 'pretty women, clever ones; I miss them—the sound of their voices and the look of their white hands and their making tea, and the light, gay talk we'd be having!' Then he sat, limp, with the grit gone out of him. 'Not one of them would come near me, now,' he said. 'Holding their skirts away from me, passing by on the other side.' And then—may the devil fly away with my tongue, Jane Vail—I heard myself saying, 'There's one won't be doing that, lad! There's one, the best and fairest and cleverest of them all, the wonder-worker of the world,' I said, 'will be putting on her gayest gear and be coming here to make tea-talk with you, the way you'll think the month of June itself is happened in your studio!'" He stopped, looking down at her with anxious eyes.

Jane took her own time about looking at him, and when she did it was almost as if she had never seen him before. He was still wearing his winter suit, this soft spring weather, and it wanted pressing and his boots were far from new. He stooped a little as he stood there, waiting for her verdict, as if even the broadest shoulders wearied finally of other people's loads, and the line of his zealot's jaw was sharper than ever. She felt nothing but scorn for him. He had birth, breeding, abilities; why must he wrap himself in monkish sackcloth, in monkish celibacy? Rage rose in her, rage and ridicule for herself. So, this was the man for whom she had dressed herself three times, cunningly and provocatively? This was the man to whom she had come running with her heart held out in her hands,—her sane, sound, hitherto unassailable heart, twenty-eight years old,—when he required of her merely a service such as he might ask of any of his Settlement workers,—money from this one, work from that one, charm and cheer from her, Jane Vail.

Worry throve in his eyes. "I'm doubting I had the right to ask you. Is it too much, indeed?"

Jane rose, lifting her shoulders ever so slightly. "The right? Why, surely. You're asking me for an hour or so of my time just as you would ask me for a check. I am to lift up the light of my countenance on this young gentleman, then, and convince him that he is still socially desirable?"

"I'll be praising you all the long days of my life if you will," he said humbly, continuing to stand.

"Sit down, then, while I put on my hat," she said carelessly, quite as she would have spoken to a messenger, and moved toward her bedroom door.

"Please"—he took one step after her—"it's riot but your little brown gown would charm the birds off the bush,—and it's not that I'd be mentioning it or asking it for myself, but——"

"No," said Jane, and her voice was as bright and dry as her eyes, "one could hardly fancy you asking anything for yourself."

"I would not, indeed," he said, grateful for the exoneration, "but I'm wondering ... wouldn't you seem grander to the lad in a—a gayer frock, perhaps?"

"Very possibly I would," said Jane, reasonably. "But I shall have to keep you waiting a little longer then." She went into the other room and shut the door slowly and softly to demonstrate the perfect control of her nerves, and proceeded to make her fourth toilet for the hour. She took her time and did her best, which was very good indeed when she put her mind to it, and she hummed a snatch of song all the while, just loud enough to carry to the study, but every time she met her shamed and furious eyes in the glass her face crisped into hotter flame and she stopped singing.

She kept him waiting for twenty-five minutes, but his eyes silently acquitted her of having wasted her time. They set off at once, Jane agreeing pleasantly that it would be better to walk. Michael Daragh had never seen her more alert and alive to the things about her. Nothing escaped her darting glance,—the lyrical, first grass in the Square, the stolid and patient tiredness of an Italian crone on a bench, the pictorial quality of a hurdy-gurdy man, and yet, for all her chattiness, the smart young person beside him seemed leagues upon leagues away from him. He supposed, miserably, that she was aghast at him for this preposterous demand upon her, but he was not penitent; he would have done it again. His people's needs were to be met with anything he would buy, borrow, or beg for them, and this radiant creature's beauty and light were only given to her in trust, after all, to be dispensed and diffused.

"You've the step of a gypsy boy," he said presently, "for all the foolish shoes you will be wearing. We're here now. 'Tis here he has his little hole of a studio."

It was a decent enough place for working and living and Jane had no doubt whatever that Daragh paid the rent. Their host was discovered bending over a chafing dish which gave forth an arresting aroma. He was a sallow youth with quick hands and too-bright eyes and he spoke in nervous jerks. "How-do-you-do? How-do-you-do? Awfully good of you. Daragh says you are interested in drawings—just look round, will you? I'll have this mess ready in a minute. Daragh said he had to go up to town early, so we'll have a combination supper tea." He flew to test the coffee, sputtering in a percolator.

Jane, slipping out of her wrap, moved slowly and graciously about the little room, well and pleasantly aware of Michael's anxious eyes upon her. His wretched friend should have all the charm and cheer which he had begged for him, but he himself should sit hungry at the feast. She picked up a bold sketch in strong color and held it off with a very real exclamation of interest. "This is good, Mr. Randal! This thing of the old woman and pushcart! I like it a lot. And the bakeshop! It's good stuff, all of it. What are you doing with it?"

"Nothing," said the young man, sullenly, his thin fingers beginning to pluck at his face. "I've just started again. I've been ... ill. I suppose Daragh's told you—about me?"

"Yes," said Jane, easily, "he's told me everything, I think, but what I'm interested in now is—what are you going to do with this stuff?"

"I don't know," he said, slackly. "It depends on how I feel. Some days"—his eyes shifted and fled before her gaze—"well, you know how it is yourself with your own work,—when you're in the mood—when you have an inspiration——"

"I don't know anything about that sort of piffle," said his guest, severely. "It's my mood to beat my poet's piano four solid hours a day, and I shouldn't know an inspiration if I met one in my mush bowl!"

He produced a nervous laugh. "Ah,—but you have your market! You're there! There's the urge—the spur——"

She looked from the crisp and living lines of his pictures to his dead, young flesh, to his fingers, locked together and straining, to keep them from their telltale plucking. "Look here," she said, "why shouldn't we do something together?"

"We—togeth—" he sat down limply on the end of his bed-couch, staring, and she heard Michael's quickened breath behind her.

"Yes! Let's try a calendar of New York. I've always had one in the attic of my mind. Twelve pictures, you know, with bits of verse, of prose,—sketches like these of yours here. There are several which would do just as they stand. This sort of thing, you know, but balanced—Grand Street pushcarts and a group of girls going into Lucy-Gertrude's on Fifth Avenue."

"I get you," he cried, jumping to his feet. "Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady——"

"But no propaganda!"

"No, no,—cut the Sob Sister stuff,—just the pattern of it all, the mosaic——"

"Yes,—done objectively!"

"Right! Gad,—that sounds like a corking idea! When can we start? Have you the text or—Good Lord—my eats!" He dashed to the noisy chafing-dish, a faint color creeping up into the unpleasant whiteness of his skin. "Everything's done! Where will you sit, Miss Vail? Give her this tray, will you, Daragh—and the napkin, man! Can she reach the sandwiches? Oh, I'm forgetting my perfectly good salad! Well, how is it? I'm not much of a cheffonier, but——"

"It's melt-in-the-mouth," said Miss Vail, warmly. "I'm going to have twice of everything!" She drew him out; she led him on; she kept the color in his face and his fingers quiet. By every pretty means in her power she made it clear that she was having an uncommonly good time, that he was distinctly her sort of person.

Michael Daragh sat back with deep wonder in his eyes. In all her exquisite plumage she had alighted in this dull place, filling it with freshness. And an onlooker would have gathered that the young artist and the beautiful lady who wrote were the best of merry chums, the silent man in the background a civilly tolerated outsider.

After a while something of this seemed to strike young Randal. "Look here, Daragh, you haven't to start uptown yet! Why don't you contribute something to the gayety of nations? Haven't you any parlor tricks?" Then he caught up his own work and his grin faded. "Tricks ... yes, that's what he can do, Miss Vail. Conjuring tricks. He can turn a skulking alley rat into something faintly resembling a man—but"—his courage and brightness fell from him like a masker's domino on the stroke of twelve and the fingers rose to his face, picking and plucking—"he can't keep it from turning back again."

"I can, indeed, lad," said the Irishman, stoutly.

"I don't know, Daragh ... I don't know." He leaned back on the couch, spineless with nervous exhaustion, and Jane felt a sick distaste and horror enveloping her.

"'Tis a true word, laddie," said Michael. "You don't know; none of us know—and we don't have to know, praises be, beyond the next hour, beyond the next step on the path." He rose and crossed slowly to the young man and pushed him gently down until he was resting at full length on the couch. "Easy, now! Let you lie there at your ease. Miss Vail knows how you haven't the whole of your strength in you yet, and you painting and drawing the day long!"

Young Randal muttered something brokenly and tried to rise, but the big Irishman held him firmly. "Easy, I'm telling you!" The boy relaxed, stretching out to his lank length, one arm crooked childishly over his eyes, and Michael Daragh sat down beside him, his long legs folded under him, on the floor. "'Tis the true word, surely," he said. "We don't know, indeed. And—glory be—there's many the time that the thing you've braced yourself so fine and strong to stand doesn't happen at all, and you never have to stand it. That was the way of it with Maggie Kinsella at home," he said.

Jane, seeing his intention, stepped to the door and snapped off the overhead light, and tilted the shade on the lamp until Randal's couch was in shadow.

"I'm so ashamed ... with her here ..." it was a muffled whisper from under the shrouding arm,—"so rotten weak...."

"This Maggie Kinsella makes the finest lace for miles about," said Michael, unhearing, unheeding. "Rare tales she would be telling me and I no higher than the sill of the window there, and I'd thought to find her long dead and buried surely, the way she was always as old as the Abbey itself. But no—there she was still in her bit of a cottage, the time I was just home, the oldest old woman I ever saw out of a mummy's wrappings and like a witch indeed with the poor, pockmarked face she has."

The figure on the couch was relaxing more and more now, and the Irishman sank his voice to a purling murmur of brogue.

Jane found a low chair and propped her elbow on the arm of it and leaned her cheek on her hand and closed her eyes. She did not want to look at young Randal and she found that she could not look at Michael Daragh. She was glad to be in a corner of the little room where the faint light of the lamp did not penetrate; she wished it might have been complete darkness to cover her. She was so unutterably tired ... never in her life had she been so tired. And Michael Daragh, her best friend of four good years, her—what should she say?—dream lover? Yes, that was sufficiently cheap and sentimental and maudlin for the sort of thing she had indulged in,—her dream lover for two blissful months, seemed as much of a stranger to her now, as strange and as unpleasantly distasteful as the young artist and dope fiend on the sagging bed-couch.

When the boy fell asleep, she would creep away, and away!



CHAPTER XIX

Meanwhile, the Irishman's voice went steadily on.

"Well, I told her there were great tales going the world over about her lace making and her getting famous and proud through the length of the land and I mind well the cackle of a laugh she gave. 'The loveliest lace, is it? Now, isn't that the great wonder surely? The wizenedy, wrinkled old hag with the God-help-you face makes the loveliest lace—' Then she stopped short off and clapped a claw over her mouth and the scar on her pockmarked face was a pitiful thing to see.

"'The curse of the crows on my tongue,' she said. 'Is himself out there in the sun the way he'd be hearing me? No? Glory be to God then, he's off to the Crossroads, to be picking up a copper maybe and the people going by to the Fair.'

"I asked her why she didn't want her husband to be hearing her make mock of her face, and she said, 'Have you the hunger on you for a tale, still, man grown that you are? Well, then, let you sit down, lad, and listen till I'm telling you the whole of it. Time was when I had a face on me would keep a man from his sleep, and 'tis no lie I'm telling you. Tall and fine I was, hair like a blackbird's wing, skin like new milk with the flush of the dawn on it, eyes like a still pool in the deep of a wood. Larry Kinsella was ever the great lad for making verses up out of his own head. "Roses in Snow," is the silly name he would be calling me.' Then she rocked herself to and fro and crooned in the cracked old voice she had—

"'Faith and hope and charity, A man has need of three! I've the faith and hope in you, You've charity for me!

"'With your lips and cheeks the rose, That is blooming in the snow, Yourself is all the miracle A man would need to know!'

"'The proud, brazen hussy I was, God be good to us! Tossing my head, stealing the other girls' lads the time we'd be footing it to the tune of the Kerry Dance at the Crossroads in the full of the moon! Father Quinn—may the angels spread his bed smooth—was always telling me to take heed of my soul which would last me forever, and have done with the sinful pride in the skin and the hair which would wither like grass. But I went my ways with a scandalous come-hither in my eye, leaning over a still pool till I'd see my bold face smiling back at me, and Larry Kinsella stealing behind to whisper his verses in my ear.

"'Then came the sickness, the plague that shadowed five counties the way you'd see a black cloud sailing down the sky of a June day. Nary a village but paid its toll in death and doom. One of the first I was, and one of the worst. Wirra, the weeks I lay on the sill of death's door,—the gray days, the black nights.

"'Came the time when I heard Father Quinn's voice and he sitting beside me, telling me slow and easy, the way you'd be talking to a child itself, that Larry Kinsella was mending and calling for me. Well, I rose up, destroyed with the weakness though I was, to be on the way to him, but there in the bit of a glass on my wall I saw my face ... my face ... Mary, be good to us ... my face! Back I fell in the black pit of despair, praying for death itself. But it would not come to my bidding. In the black of the night, in the gray of the dawn, the dreams that tormented me! Larry's voice, wheedling and soft in my ear—

"'With your lips and cheeks the rose, That is blooming in the snow——'

"'And always Father Quinn, wasted and worn with care for the living and prayer for the dead, bidding me rise up on my two feet and go to the lad I loved. Love, was it? God forgive me, the way I misnamed it then.

"'Well, then, in the dusk of one day I went with him, me leaning for weakness on his tired arm. Out of every house peered a face, but there was no lad begging a smile of me and no green envy at all in the glance of the girls. When we were well past the whole of them I went down on my two knees in the dirt of the road, the way I'd be praying at a shrine itself, for there was a white moon rising in the soul of me and I began to see clear. "Mary, Mother," I said, "God forbid the likes of me to be driving a bargain with yourself, but give me the one thing only and I'll never pester your ear again all the days of my life. Here in the dust I make a heap of all my sins and vanities,—the toss of my head and the tilt of my chin, the love-looks of the lads and the black hate of the girls, and I'll burn them for a sacrifice the way the heathen would be doing and go joyful on my way with the ashes in my mouth! Leave the children to run from me, me, the one-time wonder of the weeping west; leave the girls to make mock of my face; only Mary, Mother, for the sake of the joy he had in me, let Larry Kinsella only of all the world be seeing me still with the eyes of love, and see me fair!"

"'Then was a glad cry sounding and the pinched face of Father Quinn shining like an altar and it lighted up for Easter itself. "Glory be to God," he cried out in a great voice. "Now let you make haste to your lad, for I heard the rustle of wings on that prayer will carry it high!"

"'When Larry Kinsella heard the sound of my foot on his step he leapt up. Wirra ... down all the years I can hear the wild joy of him still—— "Core of my heart, have you come? Alannah!—With your lips and cheeks the rose——"

"'I opened my mouth to cry shame on him, mocking my face, but then the peace of God came down on me like a deep rain on a parched field, and I knew what way it would be with the two of us all the long days of this world. Larry Kinsella was blind.'"

Michael had been speaking more and more slowly and softly and he did not move for many moments after he had finished his tale. Then he stealthily rose and bent over young Randal, and tiptoed away. "Asleep," his lips barely formed the word, and he motioned Jane to follow him. She caught up her wrap and crept after him.

"I wonder," Daragh paused in the outer hall, "would I better cover him up?"

Jane nodded.

"Wait, then! I'll be soon back!"

When he came out again he was smiling. "Fine and fast asleep he is. He'll never open an eye for hours! I'll look in on him again, on my way home to-night. You were the wonder of the world to him, Jane Vail. But"—he halted on the sidewalk and peered contritely at her through the soft spring twilight,—"you are cruel weary!"

"I am ... tired," said Jane.

His voice gathered alarm. "I've never seen you the like of this. Shall I be finding a cab to rush you home?"

Pride (where was her decent pride?) rallied in her, and took the place of the earlier, racking rage. "I am not going home. I am going uptown—to the theater. I've a new man in the character part." Suddenly she knew what she was going to do. "I am going to meet Rodney Harrison there, and we are going to have supper, and to drive!" Her voice grew decisive again. That was it. Rodney Harrison. The man-she-met-on-the-boat. He would be waiting for her, and he wanted her, and she intended to want him. She visualized his special delivery letter, lying on her desk. Rodney was quite justified. They would "settle the matter once and for all, definitely and right." She would marry Rodney Harrison, and they would live like sane human beings, comfortably, logically, merrily, and there would be no dope fiends with plucking fingers and no Fallen Sisters and self-righteous settlement workers and no drab days and drab ways in their scheme of things.

"Well, then," Michael was still staring at her, unhappily, "will it be the bus, or a taxi? Myself must go in the subway to another poor lad who is waiting in Ninety-first Street, but——"

"I may as well take the subway, too." (He was not to suppose or surmise that it bothered or burdened her to be with him.) "It will make me too early, but there's a lot to talk over with them all. I've rather neglected things lately." (Mooning in her candy-motto paradise!)

"I'm doubting the upper air is better for you, the way you're so white and weary," Michael shook his head, but they went down from the mild spring weather into the glare and blare of the world beneath. It was the hour of the last mad homeward rush of the workers. They found seats, but at the next station the packing and jamming began, and when they left the third stop the car was a solid, cohesive mass of steaming humanity. Talk was mercifully impossible. Only once Michael spoke, when he got up to give his place to a thin girl in a soiled middy blouse.

"You could be getting out at the next, you know, to fill your lungs with decent air, and go on in the bus——"

She shook her head and smiled very reasonably. She fixed her eyes on a vehement advertisement in shrieking colors and tried to see how many small words she could make out of the large one. "L-i-n-e, line, and L-i-s-t, list"—(she would go into the leading lady's dressing room and do her hair and put some color in her cheeks before she saw Rodney. Good old Rodney! He had been faithful, as faithful and patient as Marty Wetherby!)—"i-n, in, and r-i-"—the car was plunged into swift darkness and the train shrieked and jolted to a dead stop.

The girl to whom Michael had given his seat jumped up and began to emit short, gasping screams.

"There's no harm at all," said Daragh, pushing her back into her seat. "The lights will be on again in two flips of a dead lamb's tail!"

The crowd took it good-naturedly enough. There were whistles and catcalls from one end of the car and a noisy imitation of a kiss. Girls giggled nervously. A man grew querulous: "Where are we? That's all I want to know. Where are we? If we're near a station, we can get out and walk. Where are we?"

The minutes dragged. Men hurried by in the outer darkness with lanterns, dim and ghoulish figures. Some one's foot was trodden on and a surly scuffle ensued. "Cut that out!" said a sharp voice. "You don't want to start nothin' here!"

Then the first man began again. "Where are we? That's what I want to know!" A woman whimpered that she was going to faint.

"Can't!" called a gruff voice, facetiously. "There ain't room!"

But it was immediately evident that she had carried out her program for there was a shrill cry, "Oh, for God's sake! Get her up! Get her up! Get her up! I'm—I'm standing on her!"

People began to sway and mutter, to push and surge. Jane felt herself lifted and swung to her feet on the seat where she had been sitting, and the Irishman's big body was spread like a shield before her. His hands were clamped upon the thin shoulders of the girl in the middy blouse, but he twisted his head to speak to Jane. "It will be all right in a wink," he said.

"Yes," she answered.

The first man began to shout, "Open this door! Want us to die like rats in a trap! Open this door!" There was a sound of splintering glass and the acrid smell of smoke.

"Fire!" squealed the girl in Michael's hold, fighting to free herself.

"Steady!" he soothed. "Let you be still now, till——"

"Fire! Fire! Fire!" It ran from solo shrieks into a frantic chorus. The middy blouse girl bit and clawed herself out of the Irishman's hands and he turned and faced Jane, his grasp on the rail above them, covering her with his body. "Lay hold of me," he commanded, and she locked her arms about his neck. The smoke-laden air was filled now with the sound of smashing windows, with labored breathing and moans and gasping sobs, with the dull impact of blows, with the grinding, rasping contact of tightly packed bodies. From time to time Michael called out to them to have patience, to have courage, to wait, and other voices echoed his words, but they were drowned out in the red sea of panic. Slowly, for all its insane haste, the crowd, that portion of it still on its feet, began to work its way through the shattered windows and doors into the black passage outside. The pressure against Jane and Michael was greatly lessened and she spoke with her lips close to his ear.

"Are we just to wait here until help comes?"

"We are just to wait here."

Presently she spoke again. "I am not afraid, M.D."

"I know you are not." He added a swift line in Gaelic.

When there was a cleared space about them, they sat down again on the seat, hand in hand, like good children. The air was growing difficult. "We must just wait until they come for us, mustn't we?" She was coughing a little.

"We must just wait."

There was a shuddering groan from the floor, just at their feet, and he bent with his pocket flash. It was the gaunt girl in the middy blouse.... "Keep fast hold of my coat," said Daragh. He bent and lifted the girl on to the opposite seat. "There must be others. I must look."

"Let me hold the flash," said Jane. "That will give you both hands free. I won't let go of you." They traversed the black length of the car, doing the grim little they could do where there was anything to be done, and then they went back to their corner. Jane's teeth were chattering. "But I'm not afraid, M.D.," she said. "It's just—the ghoulishness of it! The abysmal savagery—I can't bear it!"

"Many there were as cool as ourselves," he said, "swept on by the panic and couldn't help themselves. It was the wild few only that brought the curse. And let you remember this—for every one that pushed and fought and trampled there are twenty up there now, above ground, wondering what way they'll help us the soonest, working for us, risking, daring——"

"Yes, I know it," said Jane obediently. She leaned back in her corner. It was true that she was not afraid. She felt very peaceful and very gentle. The red rage was gone and the gray depression, and the scorn and the bitterness, and Rodney Harrison was gone. She began to talk, easily and interestedly. "You know, one looks back on this sort of thing, after it's all over, as educational. One doesn't enjoy having an experience like this, but having had it makes for growth, shouldn't you say?" His grasp on her hand tightened but he did not answer. "Well, Michael Daragh, I've crowded about every sensation into my life except—death. This is really not so bad as being in that Mexican prison was! For one thing, you're here"—she curled her fingers more tightly into his—"and there I had only my extremely civil engineer. I did my best to fall in love with him, M.D., but I couldn't seem to manage it." She stopped to cough. "The air is getting pretty awful, isn't it? But I don't believe it will be much longer, now, do you?"

"I do not," he said.

"I'm rather proud of us, aren't you, Michael Daragh?—Of course, I expect I shouldn't be so—so Nathan Hale and Casabianca and—and Lady Jane Grey—if I didn't know that we'll soon be up in the air again, safe—breathing ..." She coughed again, but her voice went on, husky, gallant. "If we could have looked an hour ahead an hour ago, you and I, dripping pity on that boy, feeling so utterly secure ourselves—'Why should the spirit of mortal be proud?' M.D., I got a silver thimble for learning that by heart when I was eight. Rollicking nursery rhyme, wasn't it? But I adored it, especially the parts I didn't understand. 'From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud'—you know, for years I thought it meant one of those fascinating places with swinging half-doors and rows and rows of feet visible from the outside, into which one's nurse would never let one peer, and I thought 'shroud' was a sort of cracker to be eaten with the beer! Wasn't that funny? I remember thinking——"

But now the big Irishman stopped her with a groan which shook him from head to heel. "Core of my heart," he said, "will you hush your pretending? God forgive me for a heedless fool has dragged you down to a black death this night!"

"What," said Jane interestedly, "what was it you called me?"

He caught her up to him, fiercely, furiously, and she could feel him trembling, that tall tower of strength, like a terrified child. "Core of my heart," he said again, and now his wild kisses separated his wild words—"Acushla ... Mavourneen ... Solis na Suile ..." and the tide of fear which had been rising in her turned and slipped away into a sea of rose and silver bliss, and with it went forever the hot shame of the afternoon and the cold misery of the evening.

It seemed to her that she could not breathe at all now, what with the acrid air and the power of his arms about her, but it did not matter. "I that loved you from the first moment my eyes were resting on the wonder of your face and heard the harps sounding in your voice, I have brought you death!"

"No, Michael Daragh," she said hoarsely, breathlessly, "you have brought me life!"

His voice was scorched and dry with smoke, and she had to strain her ears to hear his lyric lovemaking. "Journeys' end"—she thought again as she had thought that afternoon. Sarah Farraday would say that she was making phrases, trying to be clever, even in this great and terrible moment,—to be thinking that she had taken the subway to the heights.... Presently she put a reproving hand over his lips.

"Oh, Michael Daragh! I expect I don't know God as well as you do, but I know Him better than that! Of course we'll be saved! Don't keep saying you wouldn't tell me this if we weren't dying! Nothing could happen to us ... now ... what do you suppose makes me so sleepy?... Do you mind if I just sleep a—f—few minutes? I'm pretty—t—tired...."

He gathered her up wholly into his arms. "No, no! Don't go to sleep! Don't be leaving me till you must!"

She cuddled down cozily like a drowsy baby. "M.D. ... did you ever play——"

"What, Acushla?"

"Babes in the Woods? That's what we are, aren't we?" and she tried to sing, huskily, gasping——

"'And when they were dead, The robins so red Brought straw ... berry ... blos ... soms And over them——'"

"Core of my heart," he cried out, "Don't be leaving me!"

"Michael Daragh, dearest," she said quite clearly and steadily, "I love you better than all the world—and I've loved the world a lot!" Her lips groped to find his and then she was limp in his clasp.

* * * * *

Waves; waves; WAVES! Little, lulling ones, singing her to sleep; great, shining ones, splashing and crashing, lifting and flinging her; voices, tiresome, insistent, calling her, calling her, calling her in from play——

* * * * *

"There, now, God love her, she'll do!" said Michael Daragh. "No, praises be, we'll not need the ambulance! I've a machine here will take us round the park till she's drunk her fill of clean air again.... No, thank you kindly, I can take her myself.... If you'll open the door, just——"

Out in the sharp night wind, memory picked its way back, hesitating, through the chaos. "Let you rest easy, now," said the Irishman's voice, steady, cheerful, reassuring. "Don't be talking yet, the way you've no breath in you at all. Drink deep of the good air, just, till—what? Well, then, 'twas an accident in the subway, and you fainted and I carried you out, and we came up a manhole."

Barren words these, naked of charm ... bleak ... bare. She beheld herself, her bright spring plumage smirched and draggled, all her pinions trailing. About the man, too, there was something lacking, something failing, something unendurably missing and gone. "Your arms ..." she said, fretfully. Speech was still a burden. She lifted his arms and laid them about her, but they fell slackly away.

"We are back in the world again, Jane Vail," he said. "You in yours and I in mine, and 'tis a far cry between the two. 'Twas the black hole of death loosed my tongue, but now——"

"Michael Daragh"—she stopped speaking and gave herself over to the task of tugging his arm about her and holding it there with both her grimy hands—"Michael Daragh, we d—died together very splendidly—b—but we're going to l—live together just as well!"



CHAPTER XX

(TELEGRAM)

New York, N.Y. 4—10.

MISS SARAH FARRADAY, VALLEY VIEW, VERMONT.

Engaged.

JANE VAIL.

(TELEGRAM)

New York, N.Y. 4—11.

MISS SARAH FARRADAY, VALLEY VIEW, VERMONT.

Michael Daragh, of course, you goose.

JANE VAIL.

New York, April Twelfth.

SALLY DARLING,

Thanks for your two wires, though the first one—"So happy, but who is it?" was a bit feeble-minded, you must admit. Could you imagine me marrying any one in the wide world but Michael Daragh? Haven't I always intended to (no matter what I may have babbled of a man-I-met-on-the-boat, or of an extremely civil engineer!) from the first instant I set my wishful eye on his zealot's brow and his fighter's jaw and heard the burbling brogue that might be eaten with a spoon?

It's taken me four years and a subway accident, but I consider the time wholly well spent. I'm snugly and securely engaged to marry Michael Daragh and he's entirely resigned to it. In fact, one might even go so far as to say, without undue exaggeration, that he is pleased!

(I'll wager you dashed right down to the Woman's Exchange and got towels! Aren't you glad V. is such a nice, easy letter to embroider?)

That subway affair was ghastly, useful as it did prove to me. We thought surely our hour had struck, but we behaved with Early Christian Martyr fortitude and much more sprightly cheer, and when Michael Daragh thought the end had come he staged a love scene which made all the love scenes I ever wrote and all the love scenes I ever read sound like time-tables or statistics! Months of misunderstanding were explained away in minutes; he honestly believed me to be secretly engaged to Rodney Harrison (there I see the fine Italian hand of Emma Ellis, poor thing, oh, poor thing—to want Michael Daragh and not to have him!) and he still more honestly believed that I lived and moved and had my brilliant being in a world too far removed from his shabby and cumbered one, and that he was only my more or less valued but humble friend—oh, miles of that sort of piffle! Well, when we were safe in the upper air again, he basely tried to repudiate me,—handsome speeches about not shadowing my bright life and all that—very fetching as literature but not at all satisfying to a young woman who had just achieved a betrothal after long and earnest endeavor! I foiled him! You can't think how brazen I was. I was still a bit hazy with smoke and exhaustion, and I honestly believe if he hadn't given in I'd have screamed for a policeman!

But once he gave up the fruitless struggle, he began to have a very good time indeed. I will even go so far as to state that he hugs his chains.

Yours in "a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy,"

JANE.

New York. April Eighteenth.

SALLY MACHREE,

(See how Irish she is already!) The first towel has come and makes me feel such a housekeeper! You're a lamb, but you'll finish life with a tin cup and a "Pity the Blind" sign if you go on making "stitches as fine as a fairy's first tooth."

We are to be married (see how calmly and steadily she sets down that astounding word?) in June, and domesticity has descended upon me. I read only women's magazines, household departments only, I read recipes and memorize them, I haunt linen shops and furniture stores. But, oh, I need a mother and a sister or two, and you'll simply have to come down to me for a month. Can't you? Of course you can. Your mother will feed the piano. I must have you.

I've found a house in West Ninth Street, near the blessed old Square, close enough to the Brevoort when the kitchen is bolsheviking. It is deliciously old with high ceilings and haughty chandeliers and austere marble mantels, and all sorts of inconveniences which I picturesquely adore, but which will leave the noble army of labor quite cold. I shall make the drawing-room very English, part of my precious rosewood and mahogany sent down from Valley View (though I shall keep that house largely as it is) and cunning Kensington curtains and little pots of ivy, and "set-pieces" of bead work, and that dear, dim portrait of great-grandmother Vail in cap and ringlets. The dining room will be sober, too, but there's a nook just off it which I shall use for a breakfast room, looking out into the prim, Prunella scrap of garden, and that I will make giddy-gay with chintz and Minton. There'll be a remote workroom for me, far upstairs, and a friendly brown study where Michael Daragh's lame dogs may come to be helped over their stiles.

Sarah, I'm as domestic as a setting hen! I foresee I shall be a living version of Mr. Solomon's lady of the Proverb—working willingly with my hands, rising while it is yet night. (M.D. keeps fearfully early hours)—My candle going not out by night (candles will be perfect in that house!). My husband shall, indeed, be known in the gates, but he won't sitteth there, for home will be far too attractive. Nine to one, as always, I'll ply my trade, but before and after office hours I'll be looketh-ing well to the ways of my household and eateth-ing not the bread of idleness (except at tea!). Many daughters have done virtuously but I shall excel them all. I admit it.

JANE.

P.S. Michael Daragh is beamish with bliss. He's done himself out in purple and fine linen and yet manages, miraculously, not to look in the least like other men, and he doesn't even stoop any more. Sally, you know when he was in Ireland we all—especially Emma Ellis and the romantic music students—conjectured as to what he was when he was at home, and cast him for many fetching roles, from a sacrificial younger son to a Sin-eater, and always a belted earl at the very least. He has told me all about himself now, naturally, and it would be a blow to Emma E. and the little music makers, so I mercifully mean never to let them know. He hasn't any immediate family, and was brought up by an uncle who had a large and prosperous wholesale grocery business in Cork! (Could anything be less lyrical, I ask you?) He wanted M.D. to go into the business after he had finished college, and M.D., quite naturally, being M.D., wouldn't and they quarreled, and M.D. came over here with just his small income from his father's small estate, and went into settlement work. He was called home to the uncle's death-bed, but the uncle, contrary to the best literary precedents, hadn't softened to any extent worth mentioning, and died as crabbed as he had lived, greatly annoyed, no doubt, to realize that his demise released certain decent little incomes from the main family estate to the stubborn nephew, but immensely pleased with himself for making his fortune over to outsiders. So, my other-worldly spouse will have a comfortable income after all, but he may divide it with dope-fiends and Fallen Sisters and their ilk to his heart's content since my royalties, like snowballs, gather as they roll!

Sally, you must come down and stay with me. "Please, pretty please!"

JANE.

New York City, May Twentieth.

Dearest Sally,

I'm distressed beyond words that your mother is still so wretched, and I see, of course, that you cannot leave her yet. But she must hurry and be well enough to let you come for the wedding,—middle or end of June.

A rather startling thing has happened. I have a letter from Profesor Morales in Guadalajara, saying that—after all the tangling up of the red tape in the various revolutionary merry-go-rounds—things are in order at last, and little Dolores Tristeza starts me-ward as soon as a suitable traveling companion can be found. I must admit I'm a little aghast. Six months ago, I yearned to have her as a prop for my spinsterhood, but that Dark Age is about to be folded by. Of course I must stand by what I've said, and I want to, but I've answered Senor Morales, explaining my approaching marriage and that I would send for Dolores in the early fall (perhaps Michael Daragh and I can go and get her!) and inclosing a fat check for her maintenance in the meantime.

But isn't it rather a comedy situation? A big little daughter suddenly bestowed upon a busy bride-elect! But she is an angel, and I'll adore having her, just as soon as I get used to the idea again.

Love and warmest wishes to your mother, and I'm sending her some books.

Devotedly,

JANE.

New York City, May Twenty-seventh.

OLD DEAR,

So glad your mother is even a wee bit better! House and clothes are coming on famously but I'm rather rebellious at not having more of M. D.'s time. My life work will be to drag him down from his pinnacle of selflessness! His chief concern just now is for his brilliant young dope fiend, and I really shouldn't begrudge M.D. to him, for if we hadn't had supper with him that night, and gone uptown in the subway, who knows if I'd ever have won my elusive swain? Randal is doing fairly well, as regards the drug, and making some corking sketches for our joint calendar, but he needs a world of cheering and chumminess and countenance.

But one would like a little less of him, a little more of one's lover.

Rather crossly,

J.

Friday Morning.

Sally, dear, another letter has come from Mexico, and Dolores Tristeza is on her way! A highly proper geologist was returning to New York, and they dared not miss so excellent an opportunity of sending her.

And she'll be here day after to-morrow! I find myself rather gasping! I must telephone the steamship office, and I'll close this later.

Next Evening.

She will arrive on the Pearl of Peru at about three P.M. to-morrow, and M.D. is going with me to meet her. He is dear about it all, and so am I, now that I've got my breath! I'm remembering what a dewy-eyed little dove of a thing she is. A few days of happy holiday for her, and then the mildest and gayest school I can find, one where they have no stuffy rules about not letting the pupils come home for week-ends.

The Profesor explained that the Hospicio had fallen on evil days during the revolution and the children are now cared for in private families. The three different households which had been sheltering Dolores had been obliged from various circumstances to give her up, and Senor Morales regretted the limitations of his own establishment.

Poor, pitiful little creature ... little "Sorrows and Sadness!" I must pledge myself to make her over into Joys and Gladness—Alegrias y Felicidad, if I remember my Spanish at all.

I'm ashamed of those mean moments at first when I didn't want her!

Penitently,

JANE.

P.S. I mean to have her call me Aunt Jane, which will be "Tia Juana." Isn't that charming? I really don't care to be called "Mother" just now by a twelve-year-old daughter. It's—a bit un-bridal.

Sunday Night.

MY DEAR SARAH,

I wasn't up to writing you yesterday—I'm not really able to, now, but I'll try to tap you out a few feeble lines....

Oh, yes, she came. She's here! As some of my vaude-villains would say—I'll say she is!

M.D. and I met the steamer, the Pearl of Peru. Gentle, innocent-sounding name, isn't it? Sounds as if it might fitly convoy the dewy-eyed dove of my dreams.... It took a long time to dock and all the passengers were at the rail. I looked in vain for my daughter-to-be, but I was particularly struck by a sad, broken-looking, elderly man whose eager eyes raked the wharf. He turned to ask a question of a large girl beside him, a creature clad in strident hues, furrily powdered, bearing a caged parrot in one hand, a shivering, hairless, Mexican dog under her arm, a cigarette in her mouth. Her gaze became riveted upon me. She emitted a piercing shriek of joy.

"Madre virgen de mi alma!"

Then, in order that all persons present on shipboard and on the wharf might have the benefit of her remark, she translated it—"Virgin Mother of my soul!"—and every one at once laid by all other preoccupations and gave himself whole-heartedly to looking and listening.

I have never seen a more radiant expression of joy and release than that which overspread the countenance of the geologist at sight of me, and even at that instant I began to understand his emotion. It seemed an hour before the gangplank was put down. Dolores Tristeza held the parrot up so that she might see me. "Behold the virgin mother of my soul!"

"Shut your ugly mouth!" shrieked the sweet bird, happily in Spanish.

"See, little mother mine," called Dolores, shaking the cage, "Santa Catalina, the parrot of a thousand pretty talents! And here"—she held up the hairless, squirming canine—"behold little Jose-Maria, joy of my orphan heart!"

I got as close to her as possible and besought her to moderate her transports until she had landed, and I was amazed and aghast and horrified at the size of her. "But, how you've grown, Dolores!" I stammered.

She chuckled gleefully. "They lied to thee at the Hospicio, Madrecita. I was not twelve years but past fourteen! They desired, naturally, to keep me with them in the juvenile department. Thus am I loved wherever I go! Dost thou not burn to fold me to thy breast?"

What I burned to do at that instant was to turn the Pearl of Peru about and send her speeding swiftly back across the foam.

"So, now I am more than fourteen years and a half, large of my age, beautiful as all may see, of a wisdom to astonish you. In one year more, thou shalt find me a husband. Many novios have I had already! Four serenades were made to me the night before I left Guadalajara, and on the boat—" She turned to the elderly gentleman with a complacent and pitying smile. "But"—she took account for the first time of Michael Daragh—"quien es el hombron?" (Who is the big man?) "Tu novio?"

I admitted that he was my betrothed.

"No es tu esposo?" she quivered with tentative rage.

I assured her that he was not yet my husband.

"Very well, then," she said in English, "we shall see. Only, I warn thee, if when thy children come, thou lovest them more than me, I will burn out their eyes with red-hot curling irons!" (Her English is heavily accented but perfectly—horribly—understandable.)

A merciful Providence let down the gangplank and she flung herself, her shrieking, cursing parrot, her shivering dog, into my arms. Santa Catalina's seed and water cups were emptied on my frock; Jose-Maria set his little dagger teeth in my sleeve; a fierce scent assailed my nostrils; a shower of powder frosted my shoulder.

I freed myself to speak to the geologist who seemed eager to be on his way. "I am very grateful to you," I said, mendaciously. "I hope it has not been too much trouble."

"I got her here, didn't I?" he said with an air of weary pride. He looked so haggard that my heart smote me. "Senor Morales should not have burdened you. You look ill and——"

"I was a well, strong man when I left Vera Cruz," he said darkly. "I wish you luck, Miss Vail." He took one step and halted. "Do you believe in corporal punishment?"

"Mercy, no! It's a relic of barbarism. No one does, now!"

"You will," he said, earnestly, "you will! Corporal punishment?—My God,—capital!"

"Farewell, old camel," Dolores called, kindly, after his retreating figure. "Go with God!"

"Michael Daragh," I whispered, when we at last were packed into the taxi, "couldn't we stop at some school on the way home and leave her?"

"Not in those clothes, woman dear,—not with those animals."

"Cuidado, Hombron!" said my dewy-eyed dove. "If you seek to turn from me the heart of my virgin mother (she pronounces it veergeen mawther), I will not let her marry with you, and you will be old sour face soltero, and she will dress the saints! But," she went on indulgently, "if you are good to me, I am good to you! See,—I kiss up to God!"—and she wafted a heavily scented kiss toward the ceiling of the taxicab.

Desperately,

JANE.



CHAPTER XXI

Wednesday.

Well, Sally, mia, life looks a bit more rosy! I've separated Dolores from her cigarette, from her furry coat of powder, from her athletic perfume, from her circus clothes, and to-day, in spite of her incredible size (the inches and pounds she has acquired in six months!) the years have fallen from her. In a slim, brown tricotine with a wide, untrimmed hat of silky brown straw her loveliness has come back, and with it my enthusiasm.

She is docile in the main, when not too violently opposed, and I feed my fancy on the joy and pride I shall have in her, when she has finished school, in five years.

She starts on Monday, a splendid, firm, well-disciplined school where they have sensible rules about not letting the pupils come home for weekends. The head-mistress was charmed with Dolores and Dolores has "kissed up to God" her resolve to be good.

I'm honestly ashamed of my panic over first impressions. She's really an angel.

JANE.

Thursday.

She's really a demon.

J.

New York City, June 29th.

DEAREST SALLY,

It's weeks since I've written you, but I'm a broken woman, old before my time. I may not look quite so forlorn as the geologist did, but I feel it.

Did I write something about the rosy but dim and distant date when Dolores would be "through school?" Well, it's come. She's through school. And school, I might mention in passing, is through with her,—five of them, from Miss Trenchard's Spartan smartness to the gentle Spanish convent. She's a demon-baby. She's a cross between Carmen and Mary Maclane.

Of course the wedding has had to be postponed. Michael Daragh is angelic about it, and he hasn't been able to help me with Dolores as much as he would like because he's been engulfed with a new settlement house, and his dope fiend has been wobbling again, but our calendar is finished and accepted now, and a really nice girl is being really nice to him—liking him, trusting him, and M.D. is at peace about him.

Dolores came definitely home from the convent to-day with a clever note from the Mother Superior ... they feel that the child needs more space ... freedom....

Good heavens, so do I! Ay de mi, that I ever saw Mexico! And yet, the demon-baby loves me, and I love her, but I also love Michael Daragh and would like exceedingly to marry him. My house is ready, my clothes are finished, and so—nearly—am I.

But I cannot go off on a honeymoon unless I leave her in safety. Sarah, now that your mother is so improved, wouldn't you like to take a boarder? You could chain her to the baby-grand....

Distractedly,

THE VIRGIN MOTHER OF HER SOUL.

P.S. A friend, knowing of my plight, has just telephoned about a very fine New Thought school which will be glad to receive my ward. Well, they'll have some entirely new thoughts in that school which they've never had before!

J.

July Sixth.

SALLY DARLING,

I jibber with joy! The best and most beautiful of all my leading men was sent by a kind Providence to take tea with me to-day and talk over the new play idea, and while he was here Dolores Tristeza arrived in state and a taxi from the N.T. school, along with her trunk and her temper and her temperament and Santa Catalina and Jose-Maria. Utterly ignoring him, she launched upon a monologue of her fancied wrongs, dramatizing every incident, impersonating every one from the Principal to the taxi driver. I'd seen her through so many of these Mad Scenes that it left me quite cold, but not so my actor-man. When she had finished, spitting (dryly but venomously) upon all schools, and flung herself out of the room, he sprang to his feet.

"Good gad, Jane Vail,—don't you know what you've got here? A young Nazimova! An infant Kalich! Schools—nonsense! Teach her the A.B.C.'s—but don't touch that accent—and turn her loose on the stage!"

Sarah, he's right. It's the thing, the only thing, to do with her. I took her to see Nazimova to-night, and she sat star-eyed and hardly breathing. When we came home I told her my new ideal for her and she wept with joy. She swears by the green tail of Santa Catalina and kisses up to God that she will never be wicked again, and she believes it, and so do I, for I've touched her imagination at last. I've been trying to keep a Bird of Paradise in a chicken coop! I'll put her with the right people for training, and have her with me a great deal, and not try to muss up her poor little mind with mathematics.

She is lying sleepless and bright-eyed in her bed, and I must go in to her now, to soothe her off to the Poppy Fields with happy plans and prophesies.

When are you coming?

JANE.

July Eighth.

MY DEAR,

I float on a sea of rosy bliss. Randal's girl has almost promised to marry him, and he's a new man, and Dolores is a lamb, dreaming of the time she may begin her study for the stage, in the early fall.

We are to be married on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, and take the night boat for Boston and thence to Maine, to Three Meadows. It was M.D. who sent me there by scolding me into realization of my grubbiness four years ago; I want to have my honeymoon there. The Deacon and "Angerleek" have a little house which they rent, and they are making it ready for us.

I'm afraid every one at home will think me quite mad to be married here instead of in my dear old house, but Sally, after all, my wedding belongs to this world, not to that. I shall be married here at Mrs. Hills' in her big old double parlors, the ugliness conquered with flowers, and I shall wear my traveling things—as the village paper would say—"the bride, attired in a modish going-away gown"—I know you'll wail for all the trimmings, Sally dear,—the veil and the train and all the rest, but that sort of thing belongs to eighteen, not twenty-eight. I'm beyond the age of opera bouffe weddings,—I don't vision myself coming down a white-ribboned aisle with wobbly knees, covered with orange blossoms and gooseflesh! But—oh, Sally, the truth is that I would be married in a mackintosh or a bathing suit, I'm so dizzily, dazedly happy!

Dolores Tristeza, good as an angel out of a frieze, agrees to stay docilely with Emma Ellis at Hope House while we are away. She calls her "Ella de la barba" with reference to the small but determined little fringe on poor E.E.'s chin and I tremble—no, I don't! I'm not afraid of anything now. Everything is and will be perfect.

If only you can come, best of friends!

Happily,

JANE.

The Day!

MY DEAREST SALLY,

"I must be making haste, I have no time to waste— This is—this is my wedding morning!"

But my haste is done. I am radiantly ready now, and there are seven still and shining hours ahead.

My trunk is packed with jolly Island clothes; my bag stands ready to close; my sitting room is running over with gifts, little and large, proud and pitiful,—from Marty Wetherby's opulent clock and Rodney Harrison's gorgeous silver service to "Angerleek's" preserves and the hand-painted mustard pot from Ethel and Jerry and Billiken, and a virtuously ugly dusting cap from Mrs. Mussel. If only you were here, Sally dearest! But I know your mother needs you, and it must be a blessed thing to have a mother to need you!

Sally, I'm feeling very proud and very humble, very——

Later.

Just as I wrote that, Michael Daragh came, white, tight-lipped, more than ever like the Botticelli St. Michael; he was the "Captain-General of the Hosts of Heaven." All he needed was a sword.

"Woman, dear," he said, "I've the sad, terrible news will be breaking your heart."

"Have you decided not to marry me?" I asked, facetiously, but I didn't feel in the least humorous.

"'Tis my lad," he said, "Randal. She's thrown him over, that girl. Destroyed he is with grief and shame, bound again for the black pit."

I tried to comfort him. I said I was sure the boy was too firmly on his feet to slip now, but he knew better, or worse, and he said he dared not leave him for an hour, and then, Sarah, I began to see what it meant, and it turned me to iron and ice.

"You mean," I said, "you want to postpone our marriage?"

"Never that, Acushla, but—couldn't we be taking him with us? 'Tis the wild thing to be asking you, but after all, woman dear, we've the whole of our lives ahead, and for him it means all the world! Say we'll be taking him!"

Now, Sarah Farraday, I ask you, as a reasonable human being, what you think of that? To take a dope fiend with us on our honeymoon!

I seemed to see the future in one blinding flash—always our own rights, our own happiness, relentlessly pushed aside. I'm glad I can't remember all I said, but I shall remember the look on his face as long as I live. But I was right—I was right. He belongs in a painted picture, St. Michael, not in a warm, vital, human world.

So, it isn't my wedding morning after all.

J.

Three P.M.

I'm putting a special delivery stamp on this, Sally dear, so you'll get it before the other one.

I relented in sackcloth and ashes and shame, of course, and telephoned to tell him so, but I couldn't get him because he was on his way here to tell me he would yield, that he wouldn't ask me to take Randal with us. Then we had another moving scene, reversed this time, I pleading penitently to take him. M.D. said he had had a good talk with the poor lad, and he had sworn to brace up alone.

I shall always be glad I yielded, but I know now just how Abraham felt when he found the ram caught in the bushes! And I'll always be glad that for once M.D. chose happiness for himself.

Very shakily, but gratefully,

JANE.

Midnight, On the Boston Boat.

My dear, do you remember a silly song of our childhood with a refrain like this—

"I'm not blessed with surplus wealth, Bump tiddy ump bump, bump tiddy ump bump,— Off on a honeymoon all by myself, Bump tiddy ump bump bay!"

Well, my dear Sarah, that is exactly the sort of wedding journey which has fallen to me.

We were married. Yes, I'm very clear about that. Dolores, my dewy-eyed dove, stood with me, and Randal, ghastly and trembling, by Michael Daragh. The solemn old minister knotted us securely. Michael kissed me. (I'm very clear about that, too.)

Suddenly, like a cyclone, like a typhoon, Dolores Tristeza cast herself upon me. "Virgin mawther of my soul," she howled, "do not leave me! I keel myself! Ella de la barba ees nawthing to me! Do not leave me to die with these so ugly strangers! No tengo mas amiga que tu!" (Thou art my only friend!)

She was working up into a frenzy which made all her earlier efforts sound like lullabies with the soft pedal on, and she was shaking herself into convulsions and crying real tears. "Behold," she sobbed, "las lagrimas de la huerfanita!" (The tears of the little orphan!)

I counted ten. Then I turned to my new husband.

"Michael Daragh," I said, meekly, "will you take Randal with you and let me take Dolores with me?"

I wish you could have seen people's faces as we went off in a groaning taxi, ourselves, our luggage, Randal, white and protesting, Dolores, tearful but triumphant, Jose-Maria, snapping and snarling, Santa Catalina, strongly urging every one to shut his ugly mouth for the love of all the saints.

Sally, you've read a hundred stories, haven't you, which went like this—the ceremony, the good wishes, the rice, the old shoes, then—"he jerked down the curtain of the cab window,"—"Alone at last," he murmured, "my wife!" "He folded her in his arms."

I think Michael Daragh's feeling was that we were not entirely alone, and that it was a rather large order to fold in his arms a swearing parrot, a shivering, hairless dog, a robust Mexican orphan, a bride and a dope fiend, for he made not the first gesture of the above ritual.

It is after midnight. Dolores is asleep here in my stateroom, a smile of seraphic peace on her face, but in the room next door I hear the steady murmur of M.D.'s voice reading to poor Randal, who cannot sleep, who has tried to jump overboard. Michael dares not leave him for an instant, even to tell me good-night.

Sally, it is really funny, but I have to keep assuring and reminding myself that it is.

JANE.

Morning, At Three Meadows.

SALLY, MY DEAR,

Once again I crept up a river of mother-of-pearl in the gauzy dawn to this island sanctuary. The Deacon met us, amazed at our number, and led us to the silver gray house just beyond theirs on a little, lifting hill, where "Angerleek" will "do for us."

Morning brought counsel. While my husband (carelessly said—just like that!) while my husband looked after luggage I talked to Randal, sane again, haggard, abased. "My dear boy," I said, "you aren't going to be in the way at all! You'll look after yourself and be company for Michael when he wants good man-talk. It's this demon-child. If—do you suppose you could look after her for me!"

He wrung my hand. "Count on me! If there's anything I can do, to atone, to square myself—I'll be her nurse, her governess, her jailer!"

Then to a meek huerfanita, feeding her menagerie, I made oration. "Daughter of my soul, thou knowest thy presence is a joy of purest ray serene, but this Randal creature, tagging ever at the heels of my spouse——"

"Star of my heart," she said, grinding her teeth, "he is a pig and the son of a pig! Have no fear, Madrecita, I will herd him, like cattle, away from thy sight." She kissed up to God.

JANE.

The Silver Gray House, On the Lifting Hill, Three Meadows.

I have ceased to reckon time by calendars, Sally dearest, but I think we have been here, Michael Daragh and I, seven or ten days.

Oh, yes, the others are still here,—at least, they are on the island, but we never see them. They come and go like Brownies, like elves, like the "Little People" of Michael's land, bringing our meals and our mail, vanishing silently.... They stand between us and the village and the Deacon and the world. They are our shields and barriers; our sure defense; our shock absorbers. I shouldn't think of ever going on a honeymoon without them. We have signed them up for all our anniversary excursions, and between whiles we'll loan them to friends for wedding trips and rent them to a select public,—there'll be miles of Waiting List as soon as they are known!

Make your reservations early!

Whole islands and oceans of love, old dear!

Devotedly,

JANE VAIL DARAGH. (Mrs. Michael Daragh!!!)

P.S. Sally, dearest, remember what I said, the night before I left Wetherby Ridge for the first time?—That I wasn't really "going away" from you all, but only "going on?" I lost my way for a while, Sally; I was content with just "getting on," but he found me and herded me sternly back to the highroad, and now, always and forevermore, no credit to the likes of me, but because I've espoused the Captain-General of the Hosts of Heaven, I'll be going on—and on—with Michael Daragh. And, oh, my dear, but indeed—as he said of me long ago—I have been anointed with the oil of joy above my fellows!

J. V. D.

THE END