“You kind o’ got us all acquainted with one another and thinkin’ about somethin’ else but [Pg 7]pains and troubles. It’ll seem awful lonesome with you gone,” and the woman beyond heaved a prodigious sigh.

[Pg 7]

“Don’t ye believe it,” said Patsy, with conviction. “They’ll be fetching in some one a good bit better to fill my place—ye see, just.”

“No, they won’t; ’twill be another dago, likely—”

“Whist!” Patsy raised a silencing finger and looked fearsomely over her shoulder to the bed back of her.

Its inmate lay covered to the cheek, but one could catch a glimpse of tangled black hair and a swarthy skin. Patsy rose and went softly over to the bed; her movement disturbed the woman, who opened dumb, reproachful eyes.

“I’ll be gone in a minute, dear; I want just to tell you how sorry I am. But—sure—Mother Mary has it safe—and she’s keeping it for ye.” She stooped and brushed the forehead with her lips, as the staff and two of the nurses appeared.

“Faith! is it a delegation or a constabulary?” And Patsy laughed the laugh that had made her famous from Dublin to Duluth, where the bankruptcy had occurred.

“It’s a self-appointed committee to find out just where you’re going after you leave here,” said the young doctor.

[Pg 8]

[Pg 8]

Patsy eyed him quizzically. “That’s not manners to ask personal questions. But I don’t mind telling ye all, confidentially, that I haven’t my mind made yet between—a reception at the Vincent Wanderlusts’—or a musicale at the Ritz-Carlton.”

“Look here, lassie”—the old doctor ruffled his beard and threw out his chest like a mammoth pouter pigeon—“you’ll have to give us a sensible answer before we let you go one step. You know you can’t expect to get very far with that—in this city,” and he tapped the bag on her wrist significantly.

Patsy flushed crimson. For the first time in her life, to her knowledge, the world had discovered more about her than she had intended. Those humiliating eight dollars, seventy-six cents, and the crooked sixpence seemed to be scorching their way through the leather that held them. But she met the eyes looking into hers with a flinty resistance.

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