ather Healy, Mr. Green, Dr. Marsh, and a few others. Not that
he feared to face the town, but because he could not bear to enter it as
a mere visitor; to stand, as it were, on one side, as an onlooker and
not as a worker.

"You have done wonders, they tell me," he remarked to his father, "but I
feel that there is more to be accomplished, and my fingers are itching
to be doing it."

"I am just keeping your seat on the Council warm for you. Say the word,
and it is yours," remarked Samuel Quirk.

"When the word comes to me, I will send it along to you. Meanwhile, keep
firing at them, Dad. Grey Town is yawning and rubbing its eyes. The town
is beginning to realise what it is to be awake. In time it will be awake
and moving briskly."

"I'll keep on pinching them, until they must be moving just to be quit
of my fingers," Samuel Quirk replied complacently. "By the time you are
back with us this town will be a young city."

The time passed pleasantly and swiftly at "Layton." Every day brought
some new pleasure or excitement for the O'Connors, and Denis Quirk did
his utmost to make them forget the strain that they had just been
through. He proved that he could play as strenuously as he was
accustomed to work, and that he was still a young man in his mind.

One morning Kathleen O'Connor attempted to thank him for his kindness.
They were in the garden, old Mrs. Quirk resting placidly in an
easy-chair under a large oak tree, Kathleen seated beside her, and the
two men sprawled out at full length on the lawn. Desmond lay far apart,
out of earshot, while Mrs. Quirk was fast asleep.

"I don't know how to thank you----," Kathleen began.

"There is no occasion to thank me. The gratitude is on my side, Miss
O'Connor. You have made my mother happy, as no one else could have done.
No payment or reward could represent what I owe you," he answered.

"But I am a paid companion," she protested, half-laughingly.

"Money cannot buy a friend, nor pay her for her friendship," he said.
"And please not to forget that I am enjoying myself as much as you are.
It seems to me that I have never been young until now. I went from
school into a hard world, and I have been battling with it ever since.
It is only now I realise that there is something else beyond work to
make the world pleasant. Until now it has been a case of fighting hard
and keeping myself straight by means of religion. Once I was tempted to
drift--that was after my trouble, over