"There's no question about the _need_ of stopping it," said the Vicar-General, continuing his own train of thought aloud, "but how are we to do it? The feeling is a perfect dynamite factory now, and the least stumble on our part will bring an explosion. If we tried to give them the money back--and you know women have a tight grip on money--we shouldn't know where to give it. Positively we're like the family of the poor fellow who had the fit--one doctor said it would kill him to bring him to his senses, and the other said he would die if they didn't!" "And Father Martin safe in his bed with pneumonia!" groaned Father Kelly. Norah had found her progress barred by new-comers, and she had fled back to avoid them. Her cheeks reddened again, and the tears burned her eyelids; she went past too fast for more than a hurried salutation, at which Father Kelly shook his head. "That's the girl, isn't it?" said the Vicar-General. "I'm afraid the situation is a little too much for her, too; she looks excited." "Not a bit, not a bit," cried Father Kelly, undaunted; "she's a bit impulsive, but she's got good sense." "She wears too much jewelry." Norah did not hear this; she was out of the hall, speeding back to Mrs. Conner's gown that awaited her finishing touches. Her mother, a little creature with sweet temper that made amends for an entire lack of energy, was rocking over some bastings, sawing the air with her forefinger as she discoursed on the weighty splendor of the gold watch and chain, ending in gush of parental complacency, "And Norah says it'll be as much mine 's hers!" Norah could hear her chirping on, happily, while she laid away her hat in the bandbox and girt herself with a protecting apron. The talk turned her cold. "It ain't only for myself I want it," she declared to an invisible suggester, "though I _do_ want something real. I never had a real gold chain, or even a real gold breastpin, in my life--or a ring. Oh, I did want one!" She looked scornfully at the gay prism gleaming from her pretty fingers (fingers as daintily kept as any lady's); they had flashed like rubies and sapphires and diamonds from the white velvet drifts of the show-case in the great department store where she bought them when she went to the city; but now they were cheapened and dimmed by her memories of the "real" watch. She peeled them roughly from her hands. She had no morsel of news ready for the hungry ears awaiting her. To her mother's questions she answered briefly that the only thing she heard was that Freda Berglund would have a great number of new votes in the evening. Mrs. Murray tossed back a confident: _"Let_ her! I know some boys that's going to go this night, with a hundred dollars in their pockets each of 'em. Let her bring on her votes, I say. It's a good cause gits the money. But it's you'll be wearin' the watch next Sunday, and not Freda Berglund!"