sturdily started plants, and stopped over at Bath and
ordered a quaintly simple headstone which would be the Gillespie's pride
and solace.

She was very happy on her return journey to New York,--in vastly
different mood than the one of nine weeks before. Michael Daragh had
written her a brief and beautiful letter, a letter she would always keep,
as soon as he had read her story, and the thought of it warmed her like
a summer sun, but as she went down the twisting silver river she had
a vexed feeling that her postscript had been a bit of foolishness.
"_Guess which one I opened first, Michael Daragh, Do-er of Miracles?_"
Their relationship had shifted in these long weeks; ever since the
evening on Riverside Drive when he had sternly recalled her to herself,
they had gone by leaps and bounds, by hedge and byway, into a deeper and
more intimate friendship, and yet, she told herself, that added line at
the end of her letter to him was a High School girlish thing to have
done; it presupposed something between them which wasn't there at all.
She had flung it in without weighing it; she had honestly meant at the
moment, that his approval of her new and serious story was more precious
to her even than the editor's, but ... would Michael Daragh understand
it that way?

She did not write him the exact time of her arrival, and it was the
merest chance that she found him starting up the steps as her taxicab
drew up at Mrs. Hills' door. They went up together and at his first
hearty look and word she was able to laugh at herself for having worried
an instant.

"It's rare and fine to have you back, Jane Vail," he said, glowing with
gladness. "And you were good indeed to be sending me the long story
letters all the while. 'Twas like a journey itself, the way I'd be
following you up and down on that Island with all the queer folk and sad,
and waiting at the graveyard corner for the mail!"

Jane glowed in return. "It's good to be back, Michael Daragh." (The nice,
sane, sensible, dependable creature that he was! What a solid comfort it
was to have him! This was exactly the way she wanted him to act and to
feel and to be, and she wasn't--she was at some pains to assure
herself--in the very least feeling vaguely disappointed or let down by
his attitude.) "But it was the best time I ever had,--best in the sense
of being the best for me." Generously and sweetly she gave him his due.
"I'm still thanking you, you know, M.D.!"

He nodded g