face full of contrition, and patted her mother smartly on her bowed head, saying gently, "Billikin gobble-gobble dindin." Her under lip began to quiver. "Muddie not cly!"

"Ethel, there's only one thing you can bring to him, one thing that is yours to give-the truth." It seemed to Jane that she had been marching endlessly about Jericho, and that the walls were as hard and unyielding as ever, and she had only a tiny toy trumpet to blow. "Are

you going to give him a lie for a wedding-present?" The girl winced. "You can make me feel terrible, but you can't make me tell."

"No, I can't make you, nor Michael Daragh, nor Mrs. Richards; but your own heart can." Suddenly she leaned over and put her arms about the childish figure, hugging her close. "Honey, how much do you love him?"

means that you must love him more than you want him." She watched the color that had come with the tempestuous weeping ebb slowly from the small face, leaving it drained and white. Billikin, sensing something strange in her mother's

"More 'n anything in the world!" The answer came swiftly, cut through by a sob.

"More than Irene?" The head against her shoulder nodded with unhesitating emphasis. "More than the baby?" Again the nod, fainter, but still sure. "But that 's not enough, Ethel. You don't know anything about loving unless you love him more than yourself."

She wriggled out of the encircling arms and stared up at Jane.

"Ethel- oh, if I can only make you understand! More than yourself! That

look, ceased whimpering and stared. It was very still in the dingy room. Ethel's 's eyes wid

ened.

"Love him more than I want

him?" She said it

quickly in a little breathless whisper. Faintly, far down the street, a hurdygurdy ground out the "Marseillaise." It seemed to Jane

it was pulsing from her heart and through the air: "Le jour de gloire est arrivé!"

Ethel bent over the baby, crushing her in an embrace which made her cry. Then she pinned on her hat without a glance into the cracked mirror.

"I better go

quick!" she said, still whispering, as if afraid she might wake her fear again-"I better go quick!" She ran out of the room, and Jane heard her flying feet upon the stair, the slam of the front door, the sharp staccato of her steps upon the sidewalk. Billikin, released from the spell, lifted up her voice and shrilly wept.

Michael was waiting below.

"From the look of her face as she went past me," he said gladly, "I'm thinking you 've won where the rest of us lost."

"She 's going to tell him," said Jane, "but she 's left me the 'heart-scald!' Mrs. Richards, do put me to work! What can

I do to annihilate time till she comes home again?"

The matron indicated the table before her.

"How'd you like to cut out the joybells? A friend brought the paper and pattern down yesterday. It is n't the regular Christmas color, exactly, but I don't know as it matters. The shape 's real cute."

Jane looked aghast at the sheets of dull magenta board and the donor's design for a joy-bell.

"You might get the girls started on them, and then you could do the Merry Christmas sign." She shook out an envelop of pattern letters and indicated a long, narrow placard of mustard green, and Jane dropped into a chair and flew thankfully to work.

Michael smiled at her flying fingers.

"I'm remembering Masefield," he said, "the way he has it: 'Energy is agony expelled.'"

"Michael Daragh, think of her marching back alone to tell him in the glaring daylight, in a store full of chiffons and ribbons and gents' furnishings! Where are the girls? I'll take these to them."

There were seventeen of them sitting about the cleared table in the dining-room. They all wore dull brown pinafores of coarse material, and though their ages varied from twelve to twenty, their expressions were almost identical. Every face, pretty or plain, stolid or wistful, wore the same crushed and enduring look of waiting. Jane deposited the materials and explained the work. The kitchen door opened, and the eighteenth girl came in, pushing a carpet-sweeper before her, somberly engulfed in her task.

"Are n't you going to make decorations, Bertha?"

"I got to red up first, Mr. Daragh." Her small, patient eyes went briefly to his face and back to her work. She was long past thirty, gaunt, work-warped, sunshriveled.

In the hall he answered Jane's whispered query.

"Bertha. She 'd never been forty miles

He was a

from the farm in her life. harvester, years younger. Did you mind the eyes of her? She will be always working like a horse. 'T's all she knows."

Jane looked back into the dining-room. Seventeen heads were bent in silence above the table. Scissors creaked. Now and then Bertha in her zeal bumped the carpet-sweeper against a chair. Jane sat limply down on the bottom step of the stairs, which seemed to be rushing headlong out of the house of tragedy.

"I think I'm going to cry," she said unsteadily. "There they sit in those awful mud-colored pinafores-making joybells-magenta paper joy-bells! Michael Daragh, what shall I do?"

"Come and make the Merry Christmas sign," he said grimly.

"What are they going to have for Christmas?" she asked when they returned to the office, from which Mrs. Richards had been called.

"Well, every girl has a pair of woolen stockings and a cotton handkerchief, and a penny postal Christmas-card—”

"With more joy-bells, or an angel in a snow scene and a nightie?" Jane's eyes blazed with wrathful pity. "That 's one think I can do! I shall go straight from here to buy eighteen foolish, useless, pretty, impractical things! And tissue and holly and red baby ribbon and all kinds of tags and stickers!"

The door-bell rang, and Lena ushered in a man and woman, and went to summon the matron. Jane surveyed them furtively. From the country, clearly. The woman perched uneasily on the hard sofa, pushing the clumsy, double-tipped ends of her black silk gloves down upon her fingers. The man, a huge, weathered creature with gentle eyes, kept turning his high-crowned hat between his clean, rough hands. Mrs. Richards came in.

"How' do?" said the woman, a little breathlessly. "I'm Mis' Warder. You know-Bertha Carey. Well, I'm his mother." Then, as the matron looked questioningly at her companion, "Make you acquainted with my brother, Mr.

the farm the worst way. He's a good man, Bertha. He was awful' good to his wife. She 'd 'a' told you that, Mary would, with her last breath." She leaned forward anxiously. "What say, Bertha? Do you feel like you c'd marry him?"

"Bertha, you recollect my brother, Dave West? You met him last fair-time." "Yes," said Bertha, calmly. "How' do, Mr. West?"

The trio exchanged solemn, flaccid hand-shakes. There was a moment of uneasy silence before the woman began again.

"Bertha, I never said much at the time, -it ain't my way,-but it 's been on my mind constant', an' it 's been on Dave's mind, too, ain't it, Dave?"

"Uh-huh," said Mr. West, briefly. There fell another burdened pause. It seemed to Jane that she was walking into a sordid bit of Russian literature, transplanted.

"If he was my boy, I never upheld him," said Mrs. Warder, and her mournful eyes sought the matron's while she voiced again her melancholy, world-old plea and formula; "but-you know how young men is." Her brother moved his feet restlessly, and she hurried on. "So we thought, Dave 'n' me, that mebbe you 'n' him might jest as well-his wife died last year, and he needs a woman on

It seemed minutes to Jane before she heard Bertha's thin and toneless voice.

"Well I dunno but I might as well. S' long 's he knows-an' he's willin'." Bertha looked up with dull, unhoping eyes. His gentle gaze met them.

"Suits me, Bertha," he said.

The older woman rose briskly, a world of relief in her whole figure.

"Well, now that 's settled, and I 'm free to say I'm thankful." She consulted an old-fashioned gold watch with a heavy, beautifully wrought chain which she wore as a necklace. "I'll wait an' help you get your things together, an' we'll catch the five o'clock local. You c'n be married right after supper. Mr. Edwards 'll come I told him what we was aimin' Dave he 'll go on ahead, so 's to get the license."

over.

for.

a sense of dedication, aloofness; he had obeyed the command to "be separate." She tried desperately to keep her mind away from the woe in the next room, to send it across the sea. Florence-she strayed out of the gallery, along the Arno, to a little tea-room in the Via Tornabuoni where she used to go every afternoon at this time. There were always heartshaped cakes covered with green icing. Up-stairs a baby began to cry fretfully, and an opened door confessed to cabbage for dinner. A bell cut sharply into her realization of the wretched present, and she ran to answer the door, thankful for

movement.

The young man who stood upon the "Welcome" mat greeted her briefly, and walked in without waiting for an invitation. There was a close color harmony about him: his jubilant cravat picked up the dominant stripe of his silk shirt, and the royal purple of his hose struck the same note an octave lower. The removal of his velvet hat disclosed wide, flanging ears, which gave to his face an expression of quaint comedy, now strangely at variance with his aghast and solemn look.

Jane caught her breath.

"Oh," she said in a glad whisper, "I think I know who you are!"

She sat on the couch, leaning back against the wall, her eyes closed, drawing long, quivering breaths.

"Ethel," said Jane, softly, "here 's Billikin!" She went close to the couch, and the baby flung herself at her mother with a lilting squeal of joy. The girl's eyes opened, and narrowed strangely with a cold, appraising scrutiny; her hands locked together in her lap; for an instant she seemed to be weighing and balancing, then with a little brooding cry she held out her arms.

Michael smiled sunnily at Jane, but she had no eyes for him. "Come," she said. to Ethel, "both of you!" The girl followed obediently, the matron and Daragh coming curiously after her.

Ethel halted sharply at the threshold of the reception-room, staring through the gathering dusk. "Jerry!"

He strode forward to meet her, his gaze on her small, pinched face. Then it dropped to the child, and grew bleak again.

Jane slipped her hand into Michael's, and his grip on it made her wince. It seemed to her that all the love and pity in the world hung by a hair above the pit.

Billikin was not used to such frigid. scrutiny, but she had an antidote. She

"Can I," he achieved at last-"can I see Ethel?"

She considered for a luminous moment; then she drew him back from the office and pointed to a small and somber reception-room across the hall. "Wait!" she said. "I'll bring her to you." She sped up-stairs and ran to Ethel's room. The grim sister was packing the small garments into the straw telescope satchel, and Billikin, snug in knitted cap and tiny sweater, watched absorbedly. Jane caught her up, disregarding the woman's protest, and carried her down into the matron's room. Ethel's wild grief had spent itself.

with the wide little grin which had earned her the name of the God of Things as They Ought To Be. The hot color flooded his face; the freckles were drowned in a red sea, and even his ears were scarlet. Suddenly, gropingly, he drew them both into his arms.

"It'll be O.K.," he whispered; "it 'll be O.K. I got it all figured out. They been wanting me to go to Rochester, and we don't know a soul there."

Back in the matron's dim office Jane groped on her knees for the Merry Christmas sign. "Bring me the hammer and tacks, Michael Daragh," she cried. "It's going up, and it is n't going to wobble!"