“Phew!  That I consider unnecessarily heartless candor.  Did you ever hear of tempering the wind to the shorn lamb?”

“If I had met you in the end, alive and well,” said Joan thoughtfully, “I would have kept you up there on your pedestal out of mortal reach but you came into my life, hurt and pitiful, and you needed help, my sort of help, and something humanized you.  You were no longer a god.  You were something human—­”

“Thank God for that!” said Brian.

“Besides,” added Joan, twinkling, “you had clay feet.  Garry wrote me that you had an Irish temper—­”

“And I told you to write him!”

“I asked him all about you,” said Joan.  “He wrote me such a splendid letter.  It made me like you—­more.  And you can’t know what it meant when you wrote and pledged yourself to help Don.”

“Garry is my press agent,” said Brian with a sniff, “I pay him.  And I’ll dock him for the part about my temper.”

“Brian, so often I—­I’ve wanted to thank you!”

“Don’t,” he begged.  “Please don’t.  What I did—­you see,” he stammered, “it just—­happened.”

“Like the letter you wrote to me, praising someone else to guarantee your own respectability.  Is it always someone else, Brian?  Don’t you ever think of yourself?”

“Lying here,” said Brian moodily, “I’ve thought of little else.  There’s Hannah with the tablecloth.  It can’t be six o’clock.”

“It is,” said Joan.  “And Mr. Abbott’s coming to supper.”

She fled in a panic.

“Will the child never have done with chains?” Hannah demanded as the weeks slipped by.

“When it wasn’t Don, it was old Adam.  And now it’s someone else.  And Mr. O’Neill’s got more patience, Hughie, than I ever thought was in him.”

“I like him better t’other way,” said Hughie.  “Things is livelier.  I’d sooner be diggin’ dots than dronin’ along so poky.”

“It’s my opinion,” put in Hannah tartly, “that last summer just about spoiled your taste for anything but the life of a pirate.  If you must have somebody throwin’ a bottle at your head or dumpin’ ministers into the river or diggin’ treasure, things have come to a pretty pass.”

Hughie whistled.

“I ain’t the only one that’s restless,” he defended.  “Don’s as contraptious as a mule.  And I’ve caught a look in young O’Neill’s eye once or twice like old Sim’s black mare, mettlesome and anxious to bolt.”

“Until Joan slips into a chair with a book or some work,” snapped Hannah.  “Then he’s a lamb.  If I was Mr. O’Neill I’d thrash Don into common sense and I’d remind t’other young man, son or no son, that the nurse ain’t earnin’ her keep.  Joan’s earnin’ it for her.”