The knocker sounded.  Bim growled.

“At this hour!” thought Brown, with a glance at his watch lying on the table.  It was nearly two in the morning.

Holding the baby in the crook of his arm he crossed the floor and opened the door gingerly, sheltering the baby behind it.

“Is it the toothache, Misther Brown?” inquired an eagerly pitiful voice.  “Or warse?”

Mrs. Kelcey came in, her shawl covering her unbound hair—­his next-door neighbour and little Norah’s mother.  Her face was full of astonishment at sight of Brown in his bathgown and the baby in his arms.

“I’m mighty glad to see you,” Brown assured her.  “I don’t know what to do with him, poor little fellow.  I think it must be a pain.”

“The saints and ahl!” said Mrs. Kelcey.  She took the baby from him with wonted, motherly arms.  “The teeny thing!” she exclaimed.  “Where—­”

“Left on my doorstep.”

“An’ ye thried to get through the night with him!  Why didn’t ye bring him to me at wanst?”

“It was late—­your lights were out.  How did you know I was up?”

“Yer lights wasn’t out.  I was up with me man—­Pat’s a sore fut, an’ I was bathin’ it to quiet him.  I seen yer lights.  Ye sit up till ahl hours, I know, but I cud see the shadow movin’ up and down.  I says to Pat, ’He’s the toothache, maybe, and me with plinty of rimidies nixt door.’”

She turned her attention to the tiny creature in her lap.  She inquired into the case closely, and learned how the child had been fed with a teaspoon.

“To think of a single man so handy!” she exclaimed admiringly.  “But maybe he shwallied a bit too much air with the feedin’.”

“He swallowed all the air there was at hand,” admitted Brown, “and precious little milk.  But he seemed hungry, and I thought he was too little to go all night without being fed.”

“Right ye were, an’ ‘tis feedin’ he nades agin—­only not with a shpoon.  I’ll take him home an’ fix up a bit of a bottle for him, the poor thing.  An’ I’ll take him at wanst, an’ let ye get to bed, where ye belong, by the looks of ye.”

“You’re an angel, Mrs. Kelcey.  I hate to let you take him, with all you have on your hands—­”

“Shure, ‘tis the hands that’s full that can always hold a bit more.  An’ a single man can’t be bothered with cast-off childher, no matter how big his heart is, as we well know.”

And Mrs. Kelcey departed, with the baby under her shawl and a motherly look for the man who opened the door for her and stood smiling at her in the lamplight as she went away.

But when he had thrown himself, at last, on his bed, wearily longing for rest, he found he had still to wrestle a while with the persistent image of the face which was “wonderful to look at,” before kindly slumber would efface it with the gray mists of oblivion.

VII

BROWN’S FINANCIAL RESOURCES