“They’ll be fetching in some one a good bit better to fill my place—ye see, just.”

“No, they won’t; ’twill be another dago, likely—”

“Whist!” Patsy raised a silencing finger and looked fearsomely over her shoulder to the bed back of her.

Its inmate lay covered to the cheek, but one could catch a glimpse of tangled black hair and a swarthy skin. Patsy rose and went softly over to the bed; her movement disturbed the woman, who opened dumb, reproachful eyes.

“I’ll be gone in a minute, dear; I want just to tell you how sorry I am. But—sure—Mother Mary has it safe—and she’s keeping it for ye.” She stooped and brushed the forehead with her lips, as the staff and two of the nurses appeared.

“Faith! is it a delegation or a constabulary?” And Patsy laughed the laugh that had made her famous from Dublin to Duluth, where the bankruptcy had occurred.

“It’s a self-appointed committee to find out just where you’re going after you leave here,” said the young doctor.

Patsy eyed him quizzically. “That’s not manners to ask personal questions. But I don’t mind telling ye all, confidentially, that I haven’t my mind made yet between—a reception at the Vincent Wanderlusts’—or a musicale at the Ritz-Carlton.”

“Look here, lassie”—the old doctor ruffled his beard and threw out his chest like a mammoth pouter pigeon—“you’ll have to give us a sensible answer before we let you go one step. You know you can’t expect to get very far with that—in this city,” and he tapped the bag on her wrist significantly.

Patsy flushed crimson. For the first time in her life, to her knowledge, the world had discovered more about her than she had intended. Those humiliating eight dollars, seventy-six cents, and the crooked sixpence seemed to be scorching their way through the leather that held them. But she met the eyes looking into hers with a flinty resistance.

“Sure, ’twould carry me a long way, I’m thinking, if I spent it by the ha’penny bit.” Then she laughed in spite of herself. “If ye don’t look for all the world like a parcel of old mother hens that have just hatched out a brood o’ wild turkeys!” She suddenly checked her Irish—it was apt to lead her into compromising situations with Anglo-Saxon folk, if she did not leash her tongue—and slid into English. “You see, I really know quite a number of people here—rather well—too.”

“Why haven’t they come to see you, then?” asked the day nurse, bluntly.

Patsy eyed her with admiration. “You’d never make a press agent—or a doctor, I’m afraid; you’re too truthful.”

“You see,” explained the old doctor, “these friends of yours are what we professional people term hypothetical cases. We’d like to be sure of something real.”

One of Patsy’s vagabond gloves closed over the doctor’s hand. “Bless you all for your goodness! but the people are more real than you think. Everybody believes I went back with the company and I never bothered them with the truth, you see. I’ve more than one good friend among the theatrical crowd right here; but—well, you know how it is; if you are a bit down on your luck you keep away from your own world, if you can. There is a girl—just about my own age—in society here. We did a lot for her in the way of giving her a good time when she was in Dublin, and I’ve seen her quite a bit over here. I’m going to her to get something to do before the season begins. She may need a secretary or a governess—or a—cook. Holy Saint Martin! but I can cook!” And Patsy clasped her hands in an ecstatic appreciation of her culinary art; it was the only one of which she was boastful.

“I’ll tell you what,” said the old doctor, gruffly, “we will let you go if you will promise to come back if—if no one’s at home. It’s against rules, but I’ll see the superintendent keeps your bed for you to-night.”

“Thank you,” said Patsy. She waved a farewell to the staff and the ward as she went through the door. “I don’t know where I’m going or what I shall be finding, but if it’s anything worth sharing I’ll send some back to you all.”

The staff watched her down the corridor to the elevator.

“Gee!” exclaimed the youngest doctor, his admiration working out to the surface. “When she’s made her name I’m going to marry her.”

“Oh, are you?” The voice of the old doctor took on its habitual tartness. “Acute touch of philanthropy, what—eh?”

Patricia O’Connell swung the hospital door behind her and stepped out into a blaze of June sunshine. “Holy Saint Patrick! but it feels good. Now if I could be an alley cat for two months I could get along fine.”

She cast a backward look toward the granite front of the City Hospital and her eyes grew as blue and soft as the waters of Killarney. “Sure, cat or human, the world’s a grand place to be alive in.”

II

A SIGN-POST POINTS TO AN ADVENTURE

Marjorie Schuyler sat in her own snug little den, her toy ruby spaniel on a cushion at her feet, her lap full of samples of white, shimmering crêpes and satins. She fingered them absent-mindedly, her mind caught in a maze of wedding intricacies and dates, and whirled between an ultimate choice between October and June of the following year.

The world knew all there was to know about Marjorie Schuyler. It could tell to a nicety who her paternal and maternal grandparents were, back to old Peter Schuyler’s time and the settling of the Virginian Berkeleys. It could figure her income down to a paltry hundred of the actual amount. It knew her age to the month and day. In fact, it had kept her calendar faithfully, from her coming-out party, through the periods of mourning for her parents and her subsequent returns to society, through the rumors of her engagements to half a dozen young leaders at home and abroad, down to her latest conquest.

The last date on her calendar was the authorized announcement of her engagement to young Burgeman. Hence the shimmering samples and the relative values of October and June for a wedding journey.

And the world knew more than these things concerning Marjorie Schuyler. It knew that she was beautiful, of regal bearing and distinguished manner. An aunt lived with her, to lend dignity and chaperonage to her position; but she managed her own affairs, social and financial, for herself. If the world had been asked to choose a modern prototype for the young, independent American girl of the leisure class, it is reasonably safe to assume it would have named Marjorie Schuyler.

As for young Burgeman, the world knew him as the Rich Man’s Son. That was the best and worst it could say of him.

“I think, Toto,” said Marjorie Schuyler to her toy ruby spaniel, “it will be June. There is only one thing you can do with October—a church wedding, chrysanthemums, and oak leaves. But June offers so many possible variations. Besides, that gives us both one last, untrammeled season in town. Yes, June it is; and we’ll not have to think about these yet awhile.” Whereupon she dropped the shimmering samples into the waste-basket.

A maid pushed aside the hangings that curtained her den from the great Schuyler library. “There’s a young person giving the name of O’Connell, asking to see you. Shall I say you are out?”

“O’Connell?” Marjorie Schuyler raised