a fortune?' Harry asked me. And
who wouldn't, Miss Molly, not you nor I. 'Blue Peter is a cert,' said
he; 'my brother Bill will be riding.' Could you resist that?"

"Hem!" Molly would reply; "and did he win?"

"If his neck had been as long as Smoker's he would have won," Joe would
explain.

After a few days he would return to favour, and continue a pensioner
until he found work for a short time. But ill-luck ever dogged Joe's
footsteps, and his periods of work were ever briefer and briefer, until
he threatened to relapse into chronic idleness. Then, to her own
surprise, and that of all who knew her, Molly suddenly compelled Joe to
reform.

"I have a place for you, Joe, and the last you will ever be getting,"
she said. "It's a disgrace to me you are, and everyone saying I have
spoiled you. Mr. Quirk will take you on, and he is a slave-driver. He
stands over his men with a whip. It was hard work I had to get you the
place--milking the cows, and helping in the garden. But I told the man
you were a hard worker. If you don't work hard, Joe, it is the whip I
will give you with my own hands."

Whether it was this threat, a fear of Mr. Quirk, or the effects of the
mission cannot be clearly said, but Joe McCarthy clung to his work until
he eventually became overseer at "Layton." With his change in habits,
Joe also acquired a self-respect that led him to dress neatly, and to
sign the pledge. Thenceforward Molly Healy quoted him as the proof of
her powers as a reformer when taunted because of the rabble over whom
she reigned.

"There was Joe McCarthy, that would not work until I persuaded him," she
would say. "Leave the boys to me; I am correcting them."

Yet only Mrs. Quirk had absolute confidence in the girl's vocation as a
reformer. The old lady was never told of a good-for-nothing son or
husband but she would cry:

"Send him to Molly Healy. If there is any good in him, Molly will bring
it out."

Her hearers, knowing of Molly's long succession of failures, naturally
smiled at these commendations.

CHAPTER IV.

PROMOTION.

"You can run round to the meeting in the Town Hall to-night and see what
sort of a fist you make of it," said Cairns, the man who now sat in the
editorial chair of "The Grey Town Observer," to Desmond O'Connor, just
one month after the young man had been admitted to the office.

"Thank you, sir," said Desmond, springing to his feet in his excitement.

"It's a chance," said the editor