"I'm not going back to old Bercotti's again—that's flat."
"Can you get another berth?"
"Well, if there happens to be anybody in this simple and confiding country who is willing to take on as accompanist or teacher a young woman of shabby-genteel appearance, who is unable to mention a single soul as a reference, and has no character to show from her former employer—it ought to be easy!" said the girl.
Hughie regarded her reflectively.
"You take it well. I admire your pluck," he said.
"A married woman with a husband to keep has no time to worry about pluck," replied Mrs. Maclear; "she just has to do things. Besides, all the pluck in the world can't save a woman when Noddy Kinahan is about. If it hadn't been for you—by the way, would you mind telling me your name? You know mine."
Hughie told her. Presently they left the trolley-car—anglicè, electric-tram—and struck off down a street in Brooklyn. The girl turned in at a doorway, and paused at the foot of a stair.
"Won't you come up and see my husband, Mr. Marrable?" she said. "It's ten flights up, and we don't run to an elevator; but I know Dennis would like to thank you himself."
Hughie had intended to refuse,—he hated being thanked as much as most matter-of-fact people,—but, a flash of unusual insight revealing to him the fact that the true object of the invitation was not to exhibit him to the husband, but to enable this proud little lady to exhibit her husband to him, he felt reassured, and allowed himself to be borne aloft to the Maclear eyrie. Here a gigantic and impulsive son of Kerry, gaunt and hollow-eyed through long bed-keeping, wrung his hand in a manner which made him feel glad he was not a refractory terminal, what time Mrs. Maclear, in a sort of up-to-date version of the song of Miriam, described Hughie's glorious triumph over Noddy Kinahan, laying special stress upon the ecstatic period during which Mr. Kinahan, at the instance of Hughie, had enacted the part of a human pianola.
He left them at last, wondering in his heart, as he tramped home under the stars to his hotel in West Forty-Second Street, what the plucky couple were going to live on during the next two or three months. The man was still practically a cripple,—he must have been badly mangled,—and it is hard work fighting for time in a country whose motto, as regards human as well as other machinery, is: "Never repair! Scrap, and replace!"