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

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

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

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

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

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

Gibbering with perfectly proper rage,

J. V.

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

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

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

_Friday._

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