the dark; him that's no more to blame for your carryings on while
death was prowling about the door there--"

"Carryings on! Carryings on!" Jesse Bulrush was thoroughly excited and
indignant. The little devil, to put him in a hole like this! "Carryings
on! I've acted like a man all through--never anything else in your
house, and it's a shame that I've got to listen to things that have
never been said of me in all my life. My mother was a good, true woman,
and she brought me up--"

"Yes, that's it, put it on your mother now, poor woman! who isn't here
to stretch out her hand and stop you from playing a double game with two
girls so placed they couldn't help themselves--just doing kind acts for
a sick man." Suddenly she got to her feet. "I tell you, Jesse Bulrush,
that you're a man--you're a man--"

But she could keep it up no longer. She burst out laughing, and the
false tears of the actress she dashed from her eyes as she added: "That
you're a man after my own heart. But you can't have it, even if you are
after it, and you are welcome to the thirty-seven-year-old seraph in
there!" She tossed a hand towards the house.

By this time he was on his feet too, almost bursting. "Well, you wicked
little rip--you Ellen Terry at twenty-two, to think you could play it up
like that! Why, never on the stage was there such--!"

"It's the poetry made me do it. It inspired me," she gurgled. "I
felt--why, I felt here"--she pressed her hand to her heart "all the
pangs of unrequited love--oh, go away, go back to the house and read
that to her! She's in the sitting-room, and my mother's away down-town.
Now's your chance, Claude Melnotte."

She put both hands on his big, panting chest and pushed him backward
towards the house. "You're good enough for anybody, and if I wasn't so
young and daren't leave mother till I get my wisdom-teeth cut, and till
I'm thirty-seven--oh, oh, oh!" She laughed till the tears came into her
eyes. "This is as good as--as a play."

"It's the best acted play I ever saw, from 'Ten Nights in a Bar-room'
to 'Struck Oil,'" rejoined Jesse Bulrush, with a face still half ashamed
yet beaming. "But, tell me, you heartless little woman, are the verses
worth anything? Do you think she'll like them?"

Kitty grew suddenly serious, and a curious look he could not read
deepened in her eyes. "Nurse 'll like them--of course she will," she
said gently. "She'll like them because they are you. Read them to her as
you read th