tity, seemed to awake no wonder in him. He
looked as if he had finished with surprise; as if nothing could ever
startle him again.

"I want to see Ethel," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The matron and the Irishman followed them, wondering.

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

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

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

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

It was a new and unpleasing thing