"It's the way I'm asking you something now I've never dared ask you before, Jane Vail," purled the brogue, "and I'm wondering, dare I?"
"I—I'm wondering, too," said Jane.
"'Tis nothing at all you might be thinking it is! Ever since I'm back I've been screwing up my courage—but 'tis the boldest and brazenest thing my like would ever be daring to ask the likes of you!" She had never heard him talk so like a stage Irishman before; she had never known him so moved. "Whiles I'm thinking you'll say me 'yes,' and whiles I'm thinking you'll say me 'no' and whiles I'm destroyed entirely with the doubt! I'll be there inside the hour, or a half-hour itself, and let you be merciful, Jane Vail!"
"I will be waiting," she said, "and I will be merciful."
"God love you!" he cried and hung up abruptly.
She rose from her chair and stood in the middle of her clever orange and black room, icy hands clamped tightly to her burning cheeks. So! Journeys' end! She flew into the other room and with unsteady fingers divested herself of her severely smart business dress and flung a creamy cloud over her head. She justified this costume vigorously to herself. It was five o'clock—almost evening—and she wanted him to see her thus, he who had hardly ever seen her in other than the bread-and-butter garb of every day, but when she looked in the glass she shook her head. If he had at last dared to ask her to leave her sunny fields for his shadowed paths, was this the vision to reassure him?
She put on a mellow velvet of deepest brown, cunningly cut, and she had the satisfaction of knowing that it made her look like a young queen in an old frieze, but not, it was to be admitted, like a durable help-meet for a Settlement worker.
Her windows were wide to the tentative advances of spring and now she heard a ringing tread upon the pavement below, and with breathless haste she pulled off her regal raiment and flung herself into the primmest and plainest of her work frocks—a stern little brown serge with Puritan collar and cuffs, and this time she nodded approval at her reflection. Here was, indeed, a creature for human nature's daily food!
She heard his feet upon the stairs, his knuckles on the door of her sitting room, but she waited for a last long look. When she looked into that mirror again, she would see the glorified, glad face of Michael Daragh's love.