cing manner
of speech.

Young John Keene handed the message to the Widow McVeigh. He knew it
would hurt, and his arm stole about her shoulders as it did when he was
the scamp of the Monk Road gossip.

"I'm tired o' this great noisy city," she faltered, after she had
studied the message a long time. "I'm no feelin' meself at all, at
all, an' my head hurts. I must be goin' home."

"You shall stay with me, Nancy. Corney will be back in ten days at the
least. My wife wishes it, as well as myself, and we want you to see
our little Nancy. That's our baby," he said, in lower tones.

Nancy gazed at the hurrying people on the hot pavements below, at the
buildings that shot upwards past her line of vision, at the countless
windows and tangled wires; then she turned to young John and he knew
that she had seen none of them.

"I'll try, Johnny," she answered.

The days that followed were battles with weariness to Nancy McVeigh.
She did not complain, but her silence only aggravated the loneliness
which had crept into her soul. Young John Keene talked to her, amused
her, cajoled her, pleaded with her, and yet her mood was impenetrable.
Even tiny Nancy Keene's dimpled fingers could not take away the strange
unrest in her eyes. Then, when the ten days had elapsed, a second
message came: "Kiss mother and tell her to wait. Can't return for
another week. Am writing." Nancy read it and cried; not weakly, like
a woman, but with harsh, dry sobs.

"I'll be goin' home in the mornin'," she said, firmly.

The train took her away in the damp, sunless early hours, when the city
was just awakening.

"She's crazed with homesickness," young John's wife confided to her
husband, in a hushed, sad voice.

The way home was long, and Nancy chafed at the slowness of the express.
So long as it was light she watched from the car window, and not till
the pleasant quiet of the vicinity of Monk Road was reached did the
gloom-cloud rise from her face. Her heart seemed to beat free once
more, and her eyes were full of tears, but they were tears of
happiness. She left the train at Monk, and the first person to greet
her was Father Doyle, who by chance was at the station. He read a tale
of disappointment in his old friend's appearance, and he remarked,
sympathetically, "You are looking thin and tired, Mistress McVeigh."

"It's a weary day, sure enough," she admitted. The two walked side by
side, the stout priest carrying her heaviest trav