creatures; now, pushing him ruthlessly to the floor, she was a fury,
pitiless, obsessed. All the starved romance, all the pinched poverty
of her life, all the lean and lonely years she had known cried out in
hunger, not to be denied; she was a tigress doing battle for her
mate.

And then, when the rattle and roar of the train died away, BROTHER'S
hacking cough sounded from behind the closed door, and stark reality
laid hold on her again. Her thin hands went together on her breast
and then fell slackly to her sides. She seemed visibly to shrink and
shrivel. Racked and spent with her one crowded hour, she stood
looking into the bleak and empty vista of the years.

I was in the aisle before the curtain fell, speeding past the people,
the applauding people, the beautiful, kind, understanding people,
past the benediction of Michael Daragh's lifted look. The applause
followed me out through the lobby--oh, Sally dear, no choir invisible
could make half so celestial a sound!--and when I got behind the
scenes it was still coming in--solid, genuine, hearty waves of it.

I heard hurrying feet behind me but I did not pause. I guessed who it
was, but I wouldn't turn to look. In the orderly chaos of props and
people--and it was an ugly land of disillusion no longer but the land
of heart's desire, Sally--I found my gallant little band of fighting
hope, beaming and breathless after the fifth honest curtain, coming
to me on buoyant feet.

Stern St. Michael had caught up with me then, and he bent his austere
head to say very humbly, "Woman, dear, I'm so high with pride for
you, and so low with shame for me, that I could ever be doubting----"

But the grimy young stagehand, halting in front of me with an armful
of the Tramp Juggler's playthings, cut his sentence in two.

"Say,"--he held out a dark and hearty paw--"put her there, sister!
Say, I guess maybe that's poor? Say, I guess maybe that's not puttin'
it over!"

Jubilantly,

JANE.

CHAPTER V

The grave Irishman, Michael Daragh, was a constant delight. He was no
more aware, she saw clearly, of her as a person, as a woman, than he was
of Emma Ellis of the lidlike hats and shabby hair. Nothing that was human
was alien to him, certainly, and nothing that was feminine was anything
more than merely human to hi