I quite understood, and said so. As we turned our last corner, we caught the soft caress of a gentle, belated sea-breeze, and I felt my heart uplift and my brain clear. "Go on, now, you," was his parting instruction. "I will wait here till ye come back and tell me." You may be sure I made my way to the royal mansion as quickly as the temperature would permit. In response to my knock at the inner door, it was opened by Mrs. O'Connor herself. She greeted me with quiet, simple courtesy and, as soon as I was seated and she had remarked upon the heat of the day (her remarks fitting exactly into my own opinion of the weather) she asked, before I had time to even set the wheels of my diplomacy in motion: "Is Michael on the corner, sor?" "Yes," I gasped, any further need for diplomacy gone. "Tell him, sor, if you will kindly, that Tim and Mollie is here, and the baby, and we have supper most ready and is waiting for him." "You knew, then?" I asked, weakly. "Shure we all av us see him leave the boat, sor. We niver thought he'd go. And thank you, kindly, sor, for your trouble." Mrs. O'Connor crossed with me to the door, and a minute smile just beginning at the corners of her shrewd, old mouth let me out. I soon came back to my principal in the affair. "Everything is all right," I said to him, and with the usual presumption of an ambassador, added, "I have fixed it. You needn't worry." "God bless you, sor," he said as he grasped my hand. "I'll be in again soon to see you, sor. And now I—I think I will be gettin' home." So we parted, he to his loved domain, I to my club. I don't know the rest of the story. [Illustration] IN THE SMALL HOURS By Brander Matthews Suddenly he found himself wide awake. He had been lost in sleep, dreamless and spaceless; and now, without warning, his slumber had left him abruptly and for no reason that he could guess. Although he strained his ear he caught the echo of no unusual sound. He listened in vague doubt whether there might not be someone moving about in the apartment; but he could hear nothing except the shrill creak of the brakes of a train on the elevated railroad nearly a block away. Wilson Carpenter was in the habit of observing his own feelings, and he was surprised to note that he did not really expect to detect any physical cause for his unexpected awakening. Sleep had left him as inexplicably as it had swiftly.