"Yes; alone."
The color crept up and up until it reached the graying hair, crisply waved, like Jimsy's. "No King woman ever ... held harder ... than that!" he gasped. "You're a good girl, Honor Carmody. They knew ... what to ... name you, didn't they?"
She leaned nearer, holding her hand so that the rays of the night light fell on the ring. "Didn't you know I'd 'hold hard' when you let Jimsy give me this?"
He hauled himself up on an elbow and stared at it with tragic eyes. "Jeanie wore it five years.... My mother wore it thirty.... Honor Carmody, you're a good girl.... You make me ... ashamed.... Tell the boy that ... I'm sorry ... that letter. Bring him back ... in time...." He fell back, limp, gasping, and the doctor signaled to the girl to go. As she was slipping through the door the sick man spoke again, querulously. "Damn that mocking-bird ... make somebody shoot him!... There was one singing when Jimsy was born ... and when Jeanie went ... and this one now, mocking, mocking...."
She ran back to him. "Oh, Mr. King," she said, with shy fervor, "he isn't making fun of us!—Only of the bad, hard things! One sang out near Fiesta Park the day we thought Greenmount would win the championship, and one was singing the night Jimsy and I found out that we loved each other,—and this one was singing when I came home to-day!" It was a long speech for Honor and she was a little shy and breathless. "I know he doesn't mean it the way you think! He's telling us that the sad, hard, terrible things are not the real things!" Suddenly she bent and kissed his cold forehead. "Oh, Mr. King, if you listen to him with—with your heart—you'll hear it! He's mocking at trouble and disgrace,—and misunderstanding and silly pride! He's—hear him now!—he's mocking at pain and sorrow and—and death!"
Then she ran out of the room and down the long stairs and across the lawn to her own house, where a noisy and jubilant section of the Old Guard waited.