itable that he should take Emma
Ellis home to Hope House; that there had been no opportunity to ask her
to wait up for him; that she had done the only possible thing in taking a
bright and cheery leave of Mrs. Hills and coming up to her rooms. She had
waited an hour in her sitting room--Michael Daragh had often dropped in
for a chat before she went to Mexico--but when at last she heard his feet
upon the stairs, they had carried him steadily on and up to his own
floor.

And the next day and the day after that she told herself that it was
perfectly natural for Hope House and Agnes Chatterton and kindred calls
to fill his every hour. She was waiting happily and surely, and a special
delivery letter from Rodney Harrison hardly registered on her
consciousness when Mabel brought it up to her one afternoon. It was a
brief letter, turgid, almost fierce in its tone. Rodney Harrison was not
going to be put off any longer, it appeared. He would meet Jane at the
theater that evening (where she must go to pass upon the performance of a
new character-man in her second gay little play) and then she was going
to supper with him, and to drive in his new speedster, and to make up her
mind--no, not that, he'd made it up for her, once and for all--but to
settle this matter definitely and right. She read it with an indulgent
smile and put it down on her desk. Good old Rodney ... good old
man-she-met-on-the-boat....

Her telephone rang at her elbow. She had had a soft little sleigh bell
substituted for the harsh, commercial clang and even the most utilitarian
call took on a tone of revelry, but now it had an especially gay and
lilting sound, she thought. Michael Daragh's voice over the wire lacked
its usual quality of serenity; he sounded unsure of himself; almost--shy,
and Jane's grip on the receiver grew taut and her cheeks flamed.

"It's the way I'm asking you something now I've never dared ask you
before, Jane Vail," purled the brogue, "and I'm wondering, dare I?"

"I--I'm wondering, too," said Jane.

"'Tis nothing at all you might be thinking it is! Ever since I'm back
I've been screwing up my courage--but 'tis the boldest and brazenest
thing my like would ever be daring to ask the likes of you!" She had
never heard him talk so like a stage Irishman before; she had never known
him so moved. "Whiles I'm thinking you'll say me 'yes,' and whiles I'm
thinking you'll say me 'no' and whiles I'm destroyed entirely with the
doubt! I'll be