bit, 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