to himself as much as possible.  The popular story of his smoking alone in the kitchen was more or less true; only Michael as a rule sat with him, too weak-lunged for tobacco himself, but reading stray scraps from the papers to the lonely old man, and talking with him about the works, the while Jeremiah meditatively sucked his clay pipe.  One or two evenings in the week the twain spent up in Celia’s part of the house, listening with the awe of simple, honest mechanics to the music she played for them.

Celia was to them something indefinably less, indescribably more, than a daughter and sister.  They could not think there had ever been anything like her before in the world; the notion of criticising any deed or word of hers would have appeared to them monstrous and unnatural.

She seemed to have come up to this radiant and wise and marvellously talented womanhood of hers, to their minds, quite spontaneously.  There had been a little Celia—­a red-headed, sulky, mutinous slip of a girl, always at war with her step-mother, and affording no special comfort or hope to the rest of the family.  Then there was a long gap, during which the father, four times a year, handed Michael a letter he had received from the superioress of a distant convent, referring with cold formality to the studies and discipline by which Miss Madden might profit more if she had been better brought up, and enclosing a large bill.  Then all at once they beheld a big Celia, whom they spoke of as being home again, but who really seemed never to have been there before—­a tall, handsome, confident young woman, swift of tongue and apprehension, appearing to know everything there was to be known by the most learned, able to paint pictures, carve wood, speak in divers languages, and make music for the gods, yet with it all a very proud lady, one might say a queen.

The miracle of such a Celia as this impressed itself even upon the step-mother.  Mrs. Madden had looked forward with a certain grim tightening of her combative jaws to the home-coming of the “red-head.”  She felt herself much more the fine lady now than she had been when the girl went away.  She had her carriage now, and the magnificent new house was nearly finished, and she had a greater number of ailments, and spent far more money on doctor’s bills, than any other lady in the whole section.  The flush of pride in her greatest achievement up to date—­having the most celebrated of New York physicians brought up to Octavius by special train—­still prickled in her blood.  It was in all the papers, and the admiration of the flatterers and “soft-sawdherers”—­wives of Irish merchants and smaller professional men who formed her social circle—­was raising visions in her poor head of going next year with Theodore to Saratoga, and fastening the attention of the whole fashionable republic upon the variety and resources of her invalidism.  Mrs. Madden’s fancy did not run to the length of seeing her step-daughter also at Saratoga; it pictured her still as the sullen and hated “red-head,” moping defiantly in corners, or courting by her insolence the punishments which leaped against their leash in the step-mother’s mind to get at her.