The Brown Study | Page 9

and strode the floor with it again.
"Poor little chap!" he murmured. "You can't have what you want, and I
can't have what I want. But it doesn't do a bit of good to cry about
it--eh?"
The knocker sounded. Bim growled.
"At this hour!" thought Brown, with a glance at his watch lying on the

table. It was nearly two in the morning.
Holding the baby in the crook of his arm he crossed the floor and
opened the door gingerly, sheltering the baby behind it.
"Is it the toothache, Misther Brown?" inquired an eagerly pitiful voice.
"Or warse?"
Mrs. Kelcey came in, her shawl covering her unbound hair--his
next-door neighbour and little Norah's mother. Her face was full of
astonishment at sight of Brown in his bathgown and the baby in his
arms.
"I'm mighty glad to see you," Brown assured her. "I don't know what to
do with him, poor little fellow. I think it must be a pain."
"The saints and ahl!" said Mrs. Kelcey. She took the baby from him
with wonted, motherly arms. "The teeny thing!" she exclaimed.
"Where--"
"Left on my doorstep."
"An' ye thried to get through the night with him! Why didn't ye bring
him to me at wanst?"
"It was late--your lights were out. How did you know I was up?"
"Yer lights wasn't out. I was up with me man--Pat's a sore fut, an' I was
bathin' it to quiet him. I seen yer lights. Ye sit up till ahl hours, I know,
but I cud see the shadow movin' up and down. I says to Pat, 'He's the
toothache, maybe, and me with plinty of rimidies nixt door.'"
She turned her attention to the tiny creature in her lap. She inquired into
the case closely, and learned how the child had been fed with a
teaspoon.
"To think of a single man so handy!" she exclaimed admiringly. "But
maybe he shwallied a bit too much air with the feedin'."
"He swallowed all the air there was at hand," admitted Brown, "and
precious little milk. But he seemed hungry, and I thought he was too
little to go all night without being fed."
"Right ye were, an' 'tis feedin' he nades agin--only not with a shpoon.
I'll take him home an' fix up a bit of a bottle for him, the poor thing. An'
I'll take him at wanst, an' let ye get to bed, where ye belong, by the
looks of ye."
"You're an angel, Mrs. Kelcey. I hate to let you take him, with all you
have on your hands--"
"Shure, 'tis the hands that's full that can always hold a bit more. An' a

single man can't be bothered with cast-off childher, no matter how big
his heart is, as we well know."
And Mrs. Kelcey departed, with the baby under her shawl and a
motherly look for the man who opened the door for her and stood
smiling at her in the lamplight as she went away.
But when he had thrown himself, at last, on his bed, wearily longing for
rest, he found he had still to wrestle a while with the persistent image
of the face which was "wonderful to look at," before kindly slumber
would efface it with the gray mists of oblivion.

VII
BROWN'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES
"There, Tom, how's that? Does it droop as much as the one on the other
side?"
Tom Kelcey, aged fourteen, squinted critically at the long festoon of
ground-pine between the centre of the chimney-breast and the angle of
the dingy old oak-beamed ceiling.
"Drop her a couple of inches, Misther Brown," he suggested. "No, not
so much. There, that's the shtuff. Now you've got her, foine and dandy."
Brown stepped down from the chair on which he had been standing,
and stood off with Tom to view the effect.
"Yes, that's exactly right," said he, "thanks to your good eye. The room
looks pretty well, eh? Quite like having a dinner party."
"It's ilegant, Misther Brown, that's what it is," said a voice in the
doorway behind them. "Tom bhoy, be afther takin' the chair back to the
kitchen for him."
Mrs. Kelcey, mother of Tom, and next-door neighbour to Brown,
advanced into the room. She was laden with a big basket, which Brown,
perceiving, immediately took from her.
"Set it down careful, man," said she. "The crust on thim pies is that
delicate it won't bear joltin'. I had the saints' own luck with 'em this
toime, praise be."
"That's great," said Brown. "But I haven't worried about that. You
never have anything else, I'm sure."
Mrs. Kelcey shook her head in delighted protest.
"The table is jist the handsomest I iver laid eyes on," she asserted,
modestly changing the subject.

"It is pretty nice, isn't