J. V.
It was Michael Daragh's custom to read these letters three times, carefully, and then to tear them in pieces which would be annoyingly and impossibly small to the chambermaid, and to throw them into his waste-paper basket, but this time, after his third perusal, instead of destroying it he put it away in his worn leather wallet. "I'll be keeping it, just, till the next one comes," he told himself, silently, "so I can be comparing the way she's coming on—God love her."
But the next letter to come and several following held no mention of her task. It was as if she had opened the heart of her mind further than she meant to do, and was shyly standing in front of it, now, talking of things remote and removed.
Friday Morning.
I've found a way to make Dan'l happy, M.D. I was reading to him last night, and suddenly he said in his shy, repressed way, "Was you ever to a circus?" I started to say that they bored me to the bone, even in infancy, but I happened to glance up and see his eyes. He's been following his beloved vagabond about in his heart, you see. So I tried to create a circus for him—the round rag rug was the sawdust ring, the steaming kettle was the calliope, wheezing a strident song about a wooden leg, and out of thin air came the haughty ringmaster and the clown and the pink acrobats, and I remembered thankfully that I'd memorized Vachel Lindsey's "Kallyope" long ago——
"Tooting joy, tooting hope,
I am the Kallyope!
Hoot, toot, hoot, toot,
Willy, willy wah hoo,
Sizz—fizz——"