"_You_ may be," I said. "I shouldn't wonder at all if you are. But as for me, I'm not a miserable sinner and I never was. I shouldn't know an evil impulse if I met it in my mush bowl!" Then I left him, purple with scandalized rage, and found Angelique and told her my pretty plan. Oh, Michael, if you could have seen the poor thing! Her knees fairly gave way under her and she sank into a chair and put her apron over her head. I said, "I thought if you were willing, perhaps the Deacon--" but she cried out, "No, no! One time the oldes' boy, Lem," she still has a bit of the soft _habitant_ accent, "he do something bad, an' I tell a lie, so hees father shall not beat heem. By and by, he fin' out ..." she shut her eyes and shivered. "Heem he beat twice as hard ... me, he nevair believe again, all these years...." Michael Daragh, I hate the Deacon. I know you consider hate the lowest form of human activity, but I hate the Deacon with a husky, hearty, healthy hate and it has a tonic effect which I'm sure must be good for me. I feed my fancy on boiling him in oil. Gibbering with perfectly proper rage, J. V. The next note which came to the Irishman was only a line in length and a coolly typed line, but even so the letters seemed fairly to sing and to dance---- The story is done. It is good, Michael Daragh. The letter which followed it went back to the human concerns about her. _Friday._ I'm sitting on the gravestone of the four-time widower, M.D., my sweater turned up about my ears, my fingers navy blue, my nose magenta. The world is bleak and bare, indoors and out. Dan'l grows hourly weaker, but he brightens at mail time, and grins his gallant little grin at disappointment. "But he _will_," he stoutly whispers. Gentle old Uncle Robert grows fierce. "Ef I had that varmint here, I vum I c'd wring his neck!" I'm sorry to report that I am not getting on very well with hating the Deacon. (Of course, you've kept the intervening air quivering with your admonitory wirelesses!) He is suffering so hideously, and so determinedly, like a fakir. He feels he must speed the parting soul with the Scriptures and he reads terrifying things about weird beasts,--lion-mouthed leopards with feet like bears--and when he goes downstairs I try--very clumsily, M.D.--to tell Dan'l about the God you know, the one who goes with you into dark alleys and dark hearts. I wish you were here to do it. Dan'l's faith is indeed the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen, but I want to put a warm, tangible lie into his thin little claws before he goes.... Uncle Robert has "been an' went" since I began this letter, and again I must go up to Dan'l and tell him "Not _to-day_." I'm a coward, M.D. I've never seen death so close before, and I want to run away. But I won't. J. V.