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