m. It appeared, however, that he did have a
sense of values of a sort, for he halted her in the hall, one dark
December day, with a request. Would she be coming with him to-morrow to
the Agnes Chatterton Home, where there was a girl in black sorrow?

"Why, yes, of course I'll come, but--why?" Jane wanted to know. "What
makes you think I could help? I don't know very much about--that sort of
thing."

He smiled swiftly and winningly and it was astonishing to see how the
process lighted up his lean face. "Ah, that's the reason! She's had her
fill of us, God help her. The way we've been exhorting her for days on
end. You'll be bringing a fresh face and a fresh feeling to the case.
And"--he stopped and looked her over consideringly--"'tis your sort can
help and heal."

"Why?" Jane persisted. She was finding the conversation piquantly
interesting.

"Because," said Michael Daragh, and she had the startled feeling that he
was not in the least paying her a compliment but rather laying a charge
upon her, "you have been anointed with the oil of joy above your
fellows." Then, quite as if the matter were wholly settled, he gave her
directions and went his way.

Jane had never seen an Agnes Chatterton Home. She had heard of them, of
course, as asylums for what the village called Unfortunate Girls, furtive
and remote retreats for stricken creatures who fled the light of day, but
when she found herself actually on her way to see one, the following day,
she slackened her pace and made her way more slowly and with conscious
reluctance. She was a little annoyed with herself for acquiescing so
meekly to the big Irishman's plan. After all, she had not broken the old
home ties (to put it lyrically) for this sort of thing, now, had she? She
had to come to New York to seek her fortune, not to--to--whatever it was
that Michael Daragh wanted her to do. And yet, she was always being
drawn, willynilly, into any woe within her ken. Herself a contained
creature of radiant health and placid nerves with a positively masculine
aversion to scenes and applied emotion of any sort, people were always
coming and confiding in her. She had been the reluctant repository for
the secrets of half her little town. As a matter of fact, and this she
could not know of herself, it was because she demonstrated the solid
theory that one happy person was worth six who were trying to make others
happy. But now she was marching deliberately into the heart of a misery