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It was about three o’clock in the morning when the red-haired person, coming down belatedly to close the front doors, saw a shapeless heap on the porch surrounded by a radius of white-wax candles, and going up shoved at it with his foot. Whereat the heap moved slightly and muttered “Lemme shleep.”

The red-haired person said “Good Heavens!” and bending down held a lighted match to the sleeper’s face and stared, petrified. Jane opened her eyes, sat up and put her hand over her mutilated nose with one gesture.

“You!” said the red-haired person. And then mercifully the match went out.

“Don’t light another,” said Jane. “I’m an alarming sight. Would–would you mind feeling if my nose is broken?”

He didn’t move to examine it. He just kept on kneeling and staring.

“Where have you been?” he demanded.

“Over to telephone,” said Jane, and yawned. “They’re bringing everybody in automobiles–doctors, nurses, furnace man–oh, dear me, I hope I mentioned a cook!”

“Do you mean to say,” said the red-haired person wonderingly, “that you went by yourself across the fields and telephoned to get me out of this mess?”

“Not at all,” Jane corrected him coolly. “I’m in the mess myself.”

“You’ll be ill again.”

“I never was ill,” said Jane. “I was here for a mean disposition.”

Jane sat in the moonlight with her hands in her lap and looked at him calmly. The red-haired person reached over and took both her hands.

“You’re a heroine,” he said, and bending down he kissed first one and then the other. “Isn’t it bad enough that you are beautiful without your also being brave?”

Jane eyed him, but he was in deadly earnest. In the moonlight his hair was really not red at all, and he looked pale and very, very tired. Something inside of Jane gave a curious thrill that was half pain. Perhaps it was the dying of her temper, perhaps—-

“Am I still beautiful with this nose?” she asked.

“You are everything that a woman should be,” he said, and dropping her hands he got up. He stood there in the moonlight, straight and young and crowned with despair, and Jane looked up from under her long lashes.

“Then why don’t you stay where you were?” she asked.

At that he reached down and took her hands again and pulled her to her feet. He was very strong.

“Because if I do I’ll never leave you again,” he said. “And I must go.”

He dropped her hands, or tried to, but Jane wasn’t ready to be dropped.

“You know,” she said, “I’ve told you I’m a sulky, bad-tempered—-“

But at that he laughed suddenly, triumphantly, and put both his arms round her and held her close.

“I love you,” he said, “and if you are bad-tempered, so am I, only I think I’m worse. It’s a shame to spoil two houses with us, isn’t it?”

To her eternal shame be it told, Jane never struggled. She simply held up her mouth to be kissed.

That is really all the story. Jane’s father came with three automobiles that morning at dawn, bringing with him all that goes to make up a hospital, from a pharmacy clerk to absorbent cotton, and having left the new supplies in the office he stamped upstairs to Jane’s room and flung open the door.

He expected to find Jane in hysterics and the pink silk kimono.

What he really saw was this: A coal fire was lighted in Jane’s grate, and in a low chair before it, with her nose swollen level with her forehead, sat Jane, holding on her lap Mary O’Shaughnessy’s baby, very new and magenta-coloured and yelling like a trooper. Kneeling beside the chair was a tall, red-headed person holding a bottle of olive oil.

“Now, sweetest,” the red-haired person was saying, “turn him on his tummy and we’ll rub his back. Gee, isn’t that a fat back!”

And as Jane’s father stared and Jane anxiously turned the baby, the red-haired person leaned over and kissed the back of Jane’s neck.

“Jane!” he whispered.

“Jane!!” said her father.