“Exactly to a hair like Uncle Jerry’s!” cried Mrs. McCartey, overjoyed by the coincidence.  “Except that his J. stood for Jeremiah and his M. for Michael.  If you will tell me your last name, too, I’ll try and lambaste the children into callin’ you proper.  Not havin’ sorra name to speak of you by, and hearin’ me say to Pat how you favored my father’s brother, haven’t they taken to callin’ you Uncle Jerry—­more shame to them!”

The mention of the children awoke to life J.M.’s old punctilious habits.  He tried to sit up.  “But you have so little space for all your family—­you should not have taken me in; where can the children sleep?”

Mrs. McCartey pushed him back on the pillow with an affectionate firmness born of “the bringin’ up of sivin.”  “Now lay still, Uncle Jerry, and kape yourself cool.”  The name slipped out unnoticed in her hospitable fervor “Wasn’t it the least we could do when ’twas our own Mike’s ball that came near killin’ you?  An’ the children—­the boys, that is, that this is their room—­isn’t it out in the barn they’re sleepin’ on the hay?  An’ that pleased with it.  Pat and I were thinkin’ that now was a good chance to teach them to give up things—­when you’ve no old folks about you, the children are so apt to grow up selfish-like—­but they think the barn’s better nor the house, bless them, so don’t you worry.”

She pulled the bedclothes straight (J.M. noticed that they were quite clean), settled the pillow, and drew down the shade.  “Now thin, you’ve talked enough,” she said.  “Take a sup of sleep for a while.”  And to J.M.’s feeble surprise he found himself doing exactly as he was told, dozing off with a curious weak-headed feeling of comfort.

He came to his strength slowly, the doctor forbidding him to think of taking a journey for a month at least.  Indeed, J.M., thinking of his isolated tower-rooms in the deserted college town, was in no haste to leave Mrs. McCartey’s kindly, dictatorial care.  He had been very sick indeed, the doctor told him seriously, and he felt it in the trembling weakness of his first attempts at sitting up, and in the blank vacancy of his mind.

At first he could not seem to remember for more than an instant at a time how he came to be there, and later, as his capacity for thought came back, he found his surroundings grown insensibly familiar to him.  He felt himself somehow to have slipped so completely into the inside of things that it was impossible to recover the remote, hostile point of view which had been his as he had looked over the gate a fortnight ago.  For instance, knowing now, not only that the children’s faces were scrubbed to a polished redness every morning, but being:  cognizant through his window of most of the palpably unavoidable accidents of play which made them dirty half an hour later, he would have resented as unreasonable intolerance any undue emphasis on this phase of their appearance.