Michael Daragh, I suppose some day I can remember with horror how they beat him, but I can't now. I can't be sorry for him. I can't be anything but gloatingly glad. They were drunk, all of them, but when they finished with him they escorted me to the drug store, one on each side and one marching on before and banged up the night man and while I telephoned the doctor they waited for me, and then they took me home.
I wanted to scream with laughter—they couldn't walk straight, two of them—and I wanted more to cry,—"angels charge over thee—" They were! I shook hands with them and thanked them, and they mounted guard outside the house and I flew in to my lady.
Well, presently the doctor came, and then the nurse came, and then Roderick Frost III came, a frantic young man with penitent eyes, and presently Roderick Frost IV came, a bad-tempered young tenor who protested lustily at being born in a spot so far removed from his own rightful social orbit, and then morning came, and I fell into bed for three hours of sodden sleep.
Now the haughty chef from the Lake Shore Drive is here, taking royal charge, and Edna Miles' job is over. I'm going to see little Miss Marjorie and 'fess up, and take farewell of Mrs. Mussel and my kind S.F., and then, my dears, I'm coming home,—home with palms of victory.
Haven't I won, Emma Ellis? Haven't I won, Michael Daragh? Do you dare to count the one exception that gloriously proved the rule? Didn't my three unsteady angels more than make up for one poor devil? Nearly six weeks alone in the wide, cold world, dozens of kindly conductors and policemen and L guards and clerks and fellow citizens, the kind little floorwalker and Denny Dolan, and the beamish Buffalo and The Maiden's Dream, and my three avenging knights!
Own up, old dears! Admit you're beaten! I have walked The Narrow Path and found it clean and safe and good!
Triumphantly—gloatingly—
Jane.
It would be the private opinion of Emma Ellis to her dying day that Miss Vail had suppressed a good deal and had embellished a good deal, in that dramatic way of hers. She had written so much fiction and lived so much in her imagination that it was doubtful if she could (with the best intentions) tell the exact and unadorned truth about anything. Besides, even if things had happened exactly as she had chronicled them, it was not a fair test anyway; it was a very different case from those of the heroines in the two stories. Jane Vail knew she was Jane Vail, with an assured position in the literary world and a large income, and that the whole thing was only play-acting after all. But with Mr. Daragh entirely convinced and more maudlinly worshipful than ever, what was the use of saying anything? But she could think.