Mrs. Sullivan, blessed with six children of her own, alleged that it would be no trouble whatever to her to take on the sweeping, mending, and all else for an additional household, and to furnish meals for the solitary head thereof; and such was her ability to make proof of all these statements that she in part was to blame for the sad truth that Halsey was not as unhappy as he ought to have been. The chief reason for Halsey's easy readjustment, however, lay somewhere in his comparison of the Halsey blood with blood half Rawn. Grace had been cold, after all. She had openly been discontented, and especially unhappy since the birth of the deformed child. She had left him and gone to her father with no great protest; nor did she, at the occasions of their rare and lessening visits, display more than lukewarm interest in her husband and her former home. Within six months she was beginning to blossom out in raiment, in demeanor. She spoke of things not in his knowledge though in hers. She was changing. She was going up in the world. He, for the time at least, was doing no better than to stand still; as the factory now was doing, and International Power, also--marking time, waiting for something. II Ann Sullivan was not a bad philosopher, besides being a good cook, and at times she did not hesitate to engage Mr. Halsey in conversation when they met at this or that time of the day; as when by chance, one noontide when he came home for lunch, he found her sweeping down the front stair. "You're lookin' lonesome to-day, Mr. Halsey," she remarked without much preliminary. "You're fair grievin' for your wife, I suppose? But why should you expict anny woman to stay here whin she has such a Pa, with such a house as her Pa has?" "Would you have gone over there, Mrs. Sullivan?" asked Halsey, stopping and feeling in his pocket for a pipe of tobacco. It was a question they often had discussed. "Would I? In a minnit! I'd lave Jim Sullivan for iver if I'd one chanct such as your wife had." She grinned, but her look belied her speech. "What I'm wantin', Mr. Halsey," she went on, "is what anny woman wants. I want a di'mond star to wear on me head whin I'm sweeping flures. I need di'mond earrings and bracelets to wear whin I'm makin' your beds, you mind; and a silk dress that hollers 'I'm a-comin'!' whin I start out to scrub the steps. Ain't it the truth, Mr. Halsey? Ain't that what ivery woman in the wurrld, at laste in America, is wantin'?" "Sure," nodded Halsey. "Don't forget the automobile while you're wishing."