little voice. "I waited until he was gone and then
I told Jerry. He just looked at me and _looked_ at me, and made me say
it again, and then--then he just walked away without looking back. I had
to go to work, but I watched and watched, and _watched_. He never came
back to his counter. Pretty soon I just got crazy. I went over and
asked. They said he was sick, and gone home." She sagged in Michael
Daragh's hands and he lifted her and carried her into the matron's room,
the matron hurrying beside him.

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

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

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

Now she drove her mind resolutely away from the Agnes Chatterton Home,
to the Vermont village, then across the sea ... Florence ... the old
palaces ... the Arno ... the little tea room in the Via Tornabuoni where
she went sometimes at this very hour ... little heart-shaped cakes with
green icing--Upstairs three babies began to scream at once, harshly and
hideously, and an opened door somewhere at the rear of the house
confessed to cabbage for dinner, and the present came swift