“But, Mr. Hudson, my ticket?  I’m sure I won’t have the money—?”

“Advance it to you on your pay, Miss Arundel.”

“But what is the work?” Sheila still held her hand against her forehead.

Hudson laughed his short, cracked cackle.  “Jest old-fashioned house-work, dish-washing and such.  ‘Help’ can’t be had in Millings, and Girlie and Babe kick like steers when Momma leads ’em to the dish-pan.  Not that you’d have to do it all, you know, just lend a hand to Momma.  Maybe you’re too fine for that?”

“Oh, no.  I have done all the work here.  I’d be glad.  Only—­”

He came closer to her and held up a long, threatening forefinger.  It was a playful gesture, but Sheila had a distinct little tremor of fear.  She looked up into his small, brown, pensive eyes, and her own were held as though their look had been fastened to his with rivets.

“Now, look-a-here, Miss Arundel, don’t you say ‘only’ to me.  Nor ‘but.’  Nor ‘if.’  Nary one of those words, if you please.  Say, I’ve got daughters of my own and I can manage gels.  I know how.  Do you know my nickname?  Well—­say—­it’s ‘Pap.’  Pap Hudson.  I’m the adopting kind.  Sort of paternal, I guess.  Kids and dogs follow me in the streets.  You want a recommend?  Just call up Mr. Hazeldean on the telephone.  He’s the man that fetched me here to buy that picture off Poppa.”

“Oh,” said Sheila, daughter of Mark who looked at stars, “of course I shouldn’t think of asking for a recommendation.  You’ve been only too kind—­”

He put his hand on her shoulder in its thin covering and patted it, wondering at the silken, cool feeling against his palm.

“Kind, Miss Arundel?  Pshaw!  My middle name’s ‘Kind’ and that’s the truth.  Why, how does the song go—­’’T is love, ’t is love that makes the world go round’—­love’s just another word for kindness, ain’t it?  And it’s not such a bad old world either, eh?”

Without knowing it, with the sort of good luck that often attends the enterprises of such men, Hudson had used a spell.  He had quoted, almost literally, her father’s last words and she felt that it was a message from the other side of death.

She twisted about in her chair, took his hand from her shoulder, and drew it, stiff and sallow, to her young lips.

“Oh,” she sobbed, “you’re kind!  It is a good world if there are such men as you!”

When Sylvester Hudson went down the stairs a minute or two after Sheila’s impetuous outbreak, his sallow face was deeply flushed.  He stopped to tell the Irishwoman who rented the garret floor to the Arundels, that Sheila’s future was in his care.  During this colloquy, pure business on his side and mixed business and sentiment on Mrs. Halligan’s, Sylvester did not once look the landlady in the eye.  His own eyes skipped hers, now across, now under, now over.  There are some philanthropists who are overcome with such bashfulness in the face of their own good deeds.  But, sitting back alone in his taxicab on his way to the station to buy Sheila’s ticket to Millings, Sylvester turned his emerald rapidly about on his finger and whistled to himself.  And cryptically he expressed his glow of gratified fatherliness.