id="id00246">"She's as wonderful to look at as ever."

Was she? Well, she had been wonderful to look at—there could be no question of that. He had looked at her, and looked, and looked again, until his eyes had blurred with the dazzle of the vision. And having looked, there could be no possible forgetting, no merciful blotting out of the recollection of that face. He had tried to forget it, to forget the whole absorbing personality, had tried with all his strength, but the thing could not be done. It seemed to him sometimes that the very effort to efface that image only cut its outlines deeper into his memory.

The baby began to cry afresh, with sudden, sharp insistence. Brown took it up and strode the floor with it again.

"Poor little chap!" he murmured. "You can't have what you want, and I can't have what I want. But it doesn't do a bit of good to cry about it—eh?"

The knocker sounded. Bim growled.

"At this hour!" thought Brown, with a glance at his watch lying on the table. It was nearly two in the morning.

Holding the baby in the crook of his arm he crossed the floor and opened the door gingerly, sheltering the baby behind it.

"Is it the toothache, Misther Brown?" inquired an eagerly pitiful voice.
"Or warse?"

Mrs. Kelcey came in, her shawl covering her unbound hair—his next-door neighbour and little Norah's mother. Her face was full of astonishment at sight of Brown in his bathgown and the baby in his arms.

"I'm mighty glad to see you," Brown assured her. "I don't know what to do with him, poor little fellow. I think it must be a pain."

"The saints and ahl!" said Mrs. Kelcey. She took the baby from him with wonted, motherly arms. "The teeny thing!" she exclaimed. "Where—"

"Left on my doorstep."

"An' ye thried to get through the night with him! Why didn't ye bring him to me at wanst?"

"It was late—your lights were out. How did you know I was up?"

"Yer lights wasn't out. I was up with me man—Pat's a sore fut, an' I was bathin' it to quiet him. I seen yer lights. Ye sit up till ahl hours, I know, but I cud see the shadow movin' up and down. I says to Pat, 'He's the toothache, maybe, and me with plinty of rimidies nixt door.'"

She turned her attention to the tiny creature in her lap. She inquired into the case closely, and learned how the child had been fed with a teaspoon.

"To think of a single man so handy!" she exclaimed admiringly. "But maybe he shwallied a bit too much air with the feedin'."

"He swallowed all the air there was at hand," admitted Brown, "and precious little milk. But he seemed hungry, and I thought he was too little to go all night without being fed."

"Right ye were, an' 'tis feedin' he nades agin—only not with a shpoon.
I'll take him home an' fix up a bit of a bottle for him, the poor thing.
An' I'll take him at wanst, an' let ye get to bed, where ye belong, by
the looks of ye."

"You're an angel, Mrs. Kelcey. I hate to let you take him, with all you have on your hands—"

"Shure, 'tis the hands that's full that can always hold a bit more. An' a single man can't be bothered with cast-off childher, no matter how big his heart is, as we well know."

And Mrs. Kelcey departed, with the baby under her shawl and a motherly look for the man who opened the door for her and stood smiling at her in the lamplight as she went away.

But when he had thrown himself, at last, on his bed, wearily longing for rest, he found he had still to wrestle a while with the persistent image of the face which was "wonderful to look at," before kindly slumber would efface it with the gray mists of oblivion.

VII

BROWN'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES

"There, Tom, how's that? Does it droop as much as the one on the other side?"

Tom Kelcey, aged fourteen, squinted critically at the long festoon of ground-pine between the centre of the chimney-breast and the angle of the dingy old oak-beamed ceiling.

"Drop her a couple of inches, Misther Brown," he suggested. "No, not so much. There, that's the shtuff. Now you've got her, foine and dandy."

Brown stepped down from the chair on which he had been standing, and stood off with Tom to view the effect.

"Yes, that's exactly right," said he, "thanks to your good eye. The room looks pretty well, eh? Quite like having a dinner party."

"It's ilegant, Misther Brown, that's what it is," said a voice in the doorway behind them. "Tom bhoy, be afther takin' the chair back to the kitchen for him."

Mrs. Kelcey, mother of Tom, and next-door neighbour to Brown, advanced into the room. She was laden with a big basket, which Brown, perceiving, immediately took from her.

"Set it down careful, man," said she. "The crust on thim pies is that delicate it won't bear joltin'. I had the saints' own luck with 'em this toime, praise be."

"That's great," said Brown. "But I haven't worried about that. You never have anything else, I'm sure."

Mrs. Kelcey shook her head in delighted protest.

"The table is jist the handsomest I iver laid eyes on," she asserted, modestly changing the subject.

"It is pretty nice, isn't it?" agreed Brown warmly, surveying the table with mixed emotions. When he stopped to think of what Mrs. Hugh Breckenridge would say at sight of that table, set for the Thanksgiving dinner her brother, Donald Brown, was giving that afternoon, he experienced a peculiar sensation in the region of his throat. He was possessed of a vivid sense of humour which at times embarrassed him sorely. If it had not been that his bigness of heart kept his love of fun in order he would have had great difficulty, now and then, in comporting himself with necessary gravity.

Mrs. Kelcey herself had arranged that table, spending almost the entire preceding day in dashing about the neighbourhood, borrowing from Brown's neighbours the requisite articles. Brown's own stock of blue-and-white ware proving entirely inadequate, besides being in Mrs. Kelcey's eyes by no means fine enough for the occasion, she had unhesitatingly requisitioned every piece of china she could lay hands on in the neighbourhood. She had had no difficulty whatever in borrowing more than enough, for every woman in the block who knew Brown was eager to lend her best. The result was such an array of brilliantly flowered plates and cups and dishes of every style and shape, that one's gaze, once riveted thereon, could with difficulty be removed.

When Brown had first conceived this festival it had been with the idea of sending to the nearest city for a full equipment, if an inexpensive one, of all the china and glass, linen and silver necessary for the serving of the meal. But upon thinking it over it occurred to him that such an outlay would not only arouse his new friends' suspicion of his financial resources, it would deprive them of one of the chief joys in such a neighbourhood as this in which he was abiding—that of the personal sharing in the details of the dinner's preparation and the proud lending of their best in friendly rivalry.

Therefore the table, as it now stood before him in all but complete readiness for the feast, bore such witness to the warmth of esteem in which the neighbourhood held him, not to mention its resourcefulness in fitting together adjuncts not originally intended for partnership, as must have touched the heart of a dinner-giver less comprehending