which did not in the least concern her and where, she felt sure, she
would be wholly unwelcome. She stood still in an unsavory thoroughfare,
seriously considering a retreat, but she saw Michael Daragh waiting for
her on the next corner, and she kept on.

"I very nearly turned back," she said. "And I very nearly didn't come at
all. I had the most alluring invitation for matinee and tea." (Rodney
Harrison had been most insistent.)

"I had your word you'd be coming," said the Irishman. He looked at her
impersonally. She was buttoned to the chin in a cloak the color of old
red wine and there was a jubilant red wing in her dark turban, and it may
have occurred to him that she made a thread of good cheer in the dull
woof of that street, but he went at once into the story.

"Ethel's lived on at the Home ever since her baby was born. It'll be two,
soon, and herself going for eighteen."

"_Eighteen?_ Oh----"

"Yes. Doing grandly, she is, in the same shop as her good elder sister.
Well, one day she tells the matron she has a sweetheart, a decent chap,
wanting to marry her.

"'Fine,' says Mrs. Richards. 'What were we always telling you? And will
he be good to the baby?'

"'He doesn't know I've the baby,' says Ethel, 'and what's more he never
will!'

"'You'll be giving up your child, that you kept of your own free will,
that you've worked and slaved for, and be wedding him with the secret on
your soul?'

"'I will,' says the girl, and not all the king's horses and all the
king's men can move her, Jane Vail." They were picking their way through
a damp and squalid street and he stooped to set a wailing toddler on its
unsteady feet.

"'Tis the sister's doing, we think, she the hard, managing kind and Ethel
the weak slip of a thing. Coming to-day, Irene is, to carry it off to the
place she's found for it--some distant kin down Boston way, long wanting
to adopt and never dreaming this child is their own blood."

"Doesn't Ethel care for the baby?"

"There's the heart scald. 'Tis the light of her eyes. But Irene, d'you
see, has scared her into feeling sure she'll lose him if she tells. Wait
till you see the look she has on her. 'Supping the broth of sorrow with
the spoon of grief,' they would be calling it, home in Wicklow."

"And I'm to talk to her--to beg her to tell him?"

He nodded.

Jane sighed. "She'll loathe me, of course,--an absolute outsider. Coming
in--nobly giving up a matinee and tea--to rearrange her life