until you are as lively as the Widow Malone, ohone,
and twice as fat. Home, Dawnie dear, where we'll forget all about New
York. Home, with me."

I reached up uncertainly, and brought her hand down to my lips and a
great peace descended upon my sick soul. "Home--with you," I said, like
a child, and fell asleep.

CHAPTER II. MOSTLY EGGS

Oh, but it was clean, and sweet, and wonderfully still, that
rose-and-white room at Norah's! No street cars to tear at one's nerves
with grinding brakes and clanging bells; no tramping of restless feet
on the concrete all through the long, noisy hours; no shrieking midnight
joy-riders; not one of the hundred sounds which make night hideous
in the city. What bliss to lie there, hour after hour, in a delicious
half-waking, half-sleeping, wholly exquisite stupor, only rousing myself
to swallow egg-nogg No. 426, and then to flop back again on the big,
cool pillow!

New York, with its lights, its clangor, its millions, was only a
far-away, jumbled nightmare. The office, with its clacking typewriters,
its insistent, nerve-racking telephone bells, its systematic rush, its
smoke-dimmed city room, was but an ugly part of the dream.

Back to that inferno of haste and scramble and clatter? Never! Never! I
resolved, drowsily. And dropped off to sleep again.

And the sheets. Oh, those sheets of Norah's! Why, they were white,
instead of gray! And they actually smelled of flowers. For that matter,
there were rosebuds on the silken coverlet. It took me a week to get
chummy with that rosebud-and-down quilt. I had to explain carefully
to Norah that after a half-dozen years of sleeping under doubtful
boarding-house blankets one does not so soon get rid of a shuddering
disgust for coverings which are haunted by the ghosts of a hundred
unknown sleepers. Those years had taught me to draw up the sheet
with scrupulous care, to turn it down, and smooth it over, so that no
contaminating and woolly blanket should touch my skin. The habit
stuck even after Norah had tucked me in between her fragrant sheets.
Automatically my hands groped about, arranging the old protecting
barrier.

"What's the matter, Fuss-fuss?" inquired Norah, looking on. "That down
quilt won't bite you; what an old maid you are!"

"Don't like blankets next to my face," I elucidated, sleepily, "never
can tell who slept under 'em last--"

"You cat!" exclaimed Norah, making a little rush at me. "If you weren't
supposed to be ill I