for her. Oh,
I don't believe I dare!"

He nodded again, comprehendingly. "I know well the way you're feeling.
But with the likes of her, poor child, somebody has to rearrange the
lives they've mussed and mangled!"

Jane sighed again. "I'll try, Michael Daragh. You know, your two names
make me think of the wind off the three lakes on the road to Kenmare and
the black line of the McGillicuddy Reeks against the sky?"

His eyes lighted. "'Tis good, indeed, to know you've seen Ireland.
Whiles, I'm destroyed with the homesickness." He kept a long silence
after that, his eyes brooding.

Jane watched him and wondered. "He's a mystery to me," Mrs. Hetty Hills
always appended after a mention of him. (It teased her to have mysteries
in her boarding-house.) "Has an income, of course--has to have, to
live--doesn't earn anything worth mentioning with all this uplift
work--and gives away what he does get. Emma Ellis doesn't know any more
about him than I do. But I will say he's less trouble than any man I ever
had under my roof. And, of course, he's not _common_ Irish." (Mrs. Hills
had still her Vermont village feeling of red-armed, kitchen minions,
freckled butcher boys running up alley-ways, short-tempered dames in
battered hats who came--or distressingly didn't come--to you of a Monday
morning.)

They walked swiftly and without speech now, and Jane had again her sense
of his resemblance to the Botticelli St. Michael. "He ought really to be
carrying his sword and his symbol," she told herself, "and I daresay
Raphael and Gabriel are beside him if I could only see them. Am I Tobias?
And have I a fish to heal a blindness?"

"There's the house," said Michael Daragh, at length.

"Of course," said Jane, indignantly. "I should have known it at once,
even without the hideous sign, for its smugly dreary look of good works!
_Why_ must they have that liver-colored glass in the door?" They mounted
the worn steps. "And 'Welcome' on the mat! Oh, Michael Daragh, how
ghastly! Who did that to them?"

He shook his head. "Most of our things are given, you see." He rang the
bell and they heard its harsh and startling clamor.

A sullen-faced girl in a coarse, enveloping pinafore opened the door. Her
hands and arms were red and dripping and from a dim region at the rear
came the smell of dishwater. Down the narrow, precipitate stairway
floated an infant's thin, protesting wail and Jane felt a sick sense of
sudden nausea.

"Thank you, Lena,"