She was not known as the proprietor of the place. In fact, the management of the restaurant was kept a careful secret from those who frequented it and with the habitual indifference of New Yorkers to the power behind the throne, so long as its affairs were manipulated in good and regular order, they soon ceased to feel any apparent curiosity about it. Betty, who sometimes rebelled at remaining so scrupulously incognita, defiantly took the limelight at intervals and moved among the assembled guests with an authoritative and possessive air, adjusting and rearranging small details, and acknowledging the presence of habitues, but since her attentions were popularly supposed to be those of a superior head waitress, she soon tired of the gesture of offering them.

Nancy's intention had been to allow the restaurant to speak for itself, and then at the climactic moment to allow her connection with it to be discovered, and to speak for it with all the force and earnestness of which she was capable. She had meant to stand sponsor for the practical working theory on which her experiment was based, and she had already partially formulated interviews with herself in which she modestly acknowledged the success of that experiment, but the untoward direction in which it was developing made such a revelation inexpedient.

There was one regular patron to whom she was peculiarly anxious to remain incognita. Collier Pratt made it his almost invariable habit to come sauntering toward the table in the corner, under the life-sized effigy of the Venus de Medici, at seven o'clock in the evening, and that table was scrupulously reserved for him. To it were sent the choicest of all the viands that Outside Inn could command. Michael was tacitly sped on his way with his teapot full of claret. Gaspard did amazing things with the breasts of ducks and segments of orange, with squab chicken stuffed with new corn, with filets de sole a la Marguery. Nancy craftily spurred him on to his most ambitious achievements under pretense of wishing her own appetite stimulated, and the big cook, who adored her, produced triumph after triumph of his art for her delectation, whereupon the biggest part of it was cunningly smuggled out to the artist. From behind her screen of vines Nancy watched the fine features of her quondam friend light with the rapture of the gourmet as be sampled Gaspard's sauce verte or Hollandaise or lifted the glass cover from the mushrooms sous cloche and inhaled their delicate aroma.

"I wonder if he finds our food very American in character, now," she said to herself, with a blush at the memory of the real southern cornbread and candied sweet potatoes that were offered him in the initial weeks of his patronage. Gaspard still made these delicacies for luncheon, but they had been almost entirely banished from the dinner menu. Afternoon tea at the Inn was famous for the wonderful waffles produced with Parisian precision from a traditional Virginian recipe, but Collier Pratt never appeared at either of these meals to criticize them for being American.



CHAPTER VI

AN ELEEMOSYNARY INSTITUTION

One night during the latter part of July Betty had a birthday, and according to immemorial custom Caroline and Nancy and Dick and Billy helped her to celebrate it at one of the old-fashioned down-town hotels where they had ordered practically the same dinner for her anniversaries ever since they had been grown up enough to celebrate them unchaperoned. Caroline's brother, Preston, had made a sixth member of the party for the first two or three years, but he had been located in London since then, in charge of the English office of his firm, to which he had been suddenly appointed a month after he and Betty, who had been sweethearts, had had a spectacular quarrel.

Nancy stayed by the celebration until about half past nine, and then Dick put her into a taxi-cab, and she fled back to her responsibilities as mistress of Outside Inn, agreeing to meet the others later for the rounding out of the evening. As she drew up before the big gate the courtyard seemed practically deserted. The waitresses were busy clearing away the few cluttered tables left by the last late guests, and in one sheltered corner a man and a girl were frankly holding hands across the table, while they whispered earnestly of some impending parting. The big canopy of striped awning cloth had been drawn over the tables, as the rather heavy air of the evening bad been punctured occasionally by a swift scattering of rain. Nancy was half-way across the court before she realized that Collier Pratt was still occupying his accustomed seat under the shadow of the big Venus. She had not seen him face to face or communicated with him since the day she had looked him up in the telephone book and sent his cape to him by special messenger. She stopped involuntarily as she reached his side, and he looked up and smiled as he recognized her.

"You're late again, Miss Ann Martin," he said, rising and pulling out a chair for her opposite his own. "I think perhaps I can pull the wires and procure you some sustenance if you will say the word."

"I've no word to say," Nancy said, "but how do you do? I've just dined elsewhere. I only stopped in here for a moment to get something—something I left here at lunch."

"In that case I'll offer you a drop of Michael's tea in my water glass." He poured a tablespoonful or so of claret from the teapot into the glass of ice-water before him, and added several lumps of sugar to the concoction, which he stirred gravely for some time before he offered it to her. "I never touch water myself. This is eau rougie as the French children drink it. It's really better for you than ice-cream and a glass of water."

"And less American," Nancy murmured with her eyes down.

"And less American," he acquiesced blandly.

Nancy sipped her drink, and Collier Pratt stirred the dregs in his coffee cup—Nancy had overheard some of her patrons remarking on the curious habits of a man who consumed a pot of tea and a pot of coffee at one and the same meal—and they regarded each other for some time in silence. Michael and Hildeguard, Molly and Dolly and two others of the staff of girls were grouped in the doorway exactly in Nancy's range of vision, and whispering to one another excitedly concerning the phenomenon that met their eyes.

"The little girl?" Nancy said, trying to ignore the composite scrutiny to which she was being subjected, by turning determinedly to her companion, "the little girl that you spoke of—is she well?"

"She's as well as a motherless baby could be, subjected to the irregularities of a life like mine. Still she seems to thrive on it."

"Is she yours?" Nancy asked.

"Yes, she's mine," Collier Pratt said, gravely dismissing the subject, and leaving Nancy half ashamed of her boldness in putting the question, half possessed of a madness to know the answer at any cost.

"I've discovered something very interesting," Collier Pratt said, after an interval in which Nancy felt that he was perfectly cognizant of her struggle with her curiosity; "in fact, it's one of the most interesting discoveries that I have made in the course of a not unadventurous life. Do you come to this restaurant often?"

"Quite often," Nancy equivocated, "earlier in the day. For luncheon and for tea."

"I come here almost every night of my life," Collier Pratt declared, "and I intend to continue to come so long as le bon Dieu spares me my health and my epicurean taste. You know that I spoke of the food here before. The character of it has changed entirely. It's unmistakably French now, not to say Parisian. Outside of Paris or Vienna I have never tasted such soups, such sauce, such delicate and suggestive flavors. My entire existence has been revolutionized by the experience. I am no longer the lonely and unhappy man you discovered at this gate a short month ago. I can not cavil at an America that furnishes me with such food as I get in this place.

"Man may live without friends, and may live without books. But civilized man can not live without cooks,"

Nancy quoted sententiously.

"Exactly. The whole point is that the cooking here is civilized. Oh! you ought to come here to dinner, my friend. I don't know what the luncheons and teas are like—"

"They're very good," Nancy said.

"But not like the dinners, I'll wager. The dinners are the very last word! I don't know why this place isn't famous. Of course, I do my best to keep it a secret from the artistic rabble I know. It would be overrun with them in a week, and its character utterly ruined."

"I wonder if it would."

"Oh! I'm sure of it."

"What is your discovery?" Nancy asked.

Collier Pratt leaned dramatically closer to her, and Nancy instinctively bent forward across the tiny table until her face was very near to his.

"Do you know anything about the price of foodstuffs?" he demanded.

"A little," Nancy admitted.

"You know then that the price of every commodity has soared unthinkably high, that the mere problem of providing the ordinary commonplace meal at the ordinary commonplace restaurant has become almost unsolvable to the proprietors? Most of the eating places in New York are run at a loss, while the management is marking time and praying for a change in conditions. Well, here we have a restaurant opening at the most crucial period in the history of such enterprises, offering its patrons the delicacies of the season most exquisitely cooked, at what is practically the minimum price for a respectable meal."

"That's true, isn't it?"

"More than that, there are people who come here, who order one thing and get another, and the thing they get is always a much more elaborate and extravagant dish than the one they asked for. I've seen that happen again and again."

"Have you?" Nancy asked faintly, shrinking a little beneath the intentness of his look. "How—how do you account for it?"

"There's only one way to account for it."

"Do you think that there is an—an unlimited amount of capital behind it?"

"I think that goes without saying," he said; "there must be an unlimited amount of capital behind it, or it wouldn't continue to flourish like a green bay tree; but that's not in the nature of a discovery. Anybody with any power of observation at all would have come to that conclusion long since."

"Then, what is it you have found out?" Nancy asked, quaking.

"My discovery is—" Collier Pratt paused for the whole effect of his revelation to penetrate to her consciousness, "that this whole outfit is run philanthropically."

"Philanthropically?"

"Don't you see? There can't be any other explanation of it. It's an eleemosynary institution. That's what it is."

Nancy met his expectant eyes with a trifle of wildness in her own, but he continued to hold her gaze triumphantly.

"Don't you see," he repeated, "doesn't everything point to that as the only possible explanation? It's some rich woman's plaything. That accounts for the food, the setting,—everything in fact that has puzzled us. Amateur,—that's the word; effective, delightful but inexperienced. It sticks out all over the place."

"The food isn't amateur," Nancy said, a little resentfully.

"Nothing is amateur but the spirit behind it, through which we profit. Don't you see?"

"I'm beginning to see," Nancy admitted, "perhaps you are right. I guess the place is run philanthropically. I—I hadn't quite realized it before."

"What did you think?"

"I knew that the—one who was running it wasn't quite sure where she was coming out, but I didn't think of it is an eleemosynary institution."

"Of course, it is."

"It's an unscrupulous sort of charity, then," Nancy mused, "if it's masquerading as self-respecting and self-supporting. I—I've never approved of things like that."

"Why quarrel with a scheme so beneficent?"

"Don't you care?" Nancy asked with a catch in her voice that was very like an appeal.

He shook his head.

"Why should I?" he smiled.

"Then I don't care, either," she decided with an emphasis that was entirely lost on the man on the other side of the table.



CHAPTER VII

CAVE-MAN STUFF

"Cave-man stuff," Billy said to Dick, pointing a thumb over his shoulder toward the interior of the Broadway moving-picture palace at the exit of which they had just met accidentally. "It always goes big, doesn't it?"

"It does," Dick agreed thoughtfully, "in the movies anyhow."

"Caroline says that the modern woman has her response to that kind of thing refined all out of her." Billy intended his tone to be entirely jocular, but there was a note of anxiety in it that was not lost on his friend.

Dick paused under the shelter of a lurid poster—displaying a fierce gentleman in crude blue, showing all his teeth, and in the act of strangling an early Victorian ingenue with a dimple,—and lit a cigarette with his first match.

"Caroline may have," he said, puffing to keep his light against the breeze, "but I doubt it."

"Rough stuff doesn't seem to appeal to her," Billy said, quite humorously this time.

"She's healthy," Dick mused, "rides horseback, plays tennis and all that. Wouldn't she have liked the guy that swung himself on the roof between the two poles?" He indicated again the direction of the theater from which they had just emerged.

"She would have liked him," Billy said gloomily, "but the show would have started her arguing about this whole moving-picture proposition,—its crudity, and its tremendous sacrifice of artistic values, and so on and so on."

"Sure, she's a highbrow. Highbrows always cerebrate about the movies in one way or another. Nancy doesn't get it at just that angle, of course. She hasn't got Caroline's intellectual appetite. She's not interested in the movies because she hasn't got a moving-picture house of her own. The world is not Nancy's oyster—it's her lump of putty."

"I don't know which is the worst," Billy said. "Caroline won't listen to anything you say to her,—but then neither will Nancy."

"Women never listen to anything," Dick said profoundly, "unless they're doing it on purpose, or they happen to be interested. I imagine Caroline is a little less tractable, but Nancy is capable of doing the most damage. She works with concrete materials. Caroline's kit is crammed with nothing but ideas."

"Nothing but—" Billy groaned.

"As for this cave-man business—theoretically, they ought to react to it,—both of them. They're both normal, well-balanced young ladies."

"They're both runnin' pretty hard to keep in the same place, just at present."

"Nancy isn't doing that—not by a long shot," Dick said.

"She's not keeping in the same place certainly," Billy agreed. "Caroline is all eaten up by this economic independence idea."

"It's a good idea," Dick admitted; "economic conditions are changing. No reason at all that a woman shouldn't prove herself willing to cope with them, as long as she gets things in the order of their importance. Earning her living isn't better than the Mother-Home-and-Heaven job. It's a way out, if she gets left, or gets stung."

"I'm only thankful Caroline can't hear you." Billy raised pious eyes to heaven but he continued more seriously after a second, "It's all right to theorize, but practically speaking both our girls are getting beyond our control."

"I'm not engaged to Nancy," Dick said a trifle stiffly.

"Well, you ought to be," Billy said.

Dick stiffened. He was not used to speaking of his relations with Nancy to any one—even to Billy, who was the closest friend he had. They walked up Broadway in silence for a while, toward the cross-street which housed the university club which was their common objective.

"I know I ought to be," Dick said, just as Billy was formulating an apology for his presumption, "or I ought to marry her out of hand. This watchful waiting's entirely the wrong idea."

"Why do we do it then?" Billy inquired pathetically.

"I wanted Nancy to sow her economic wild oats. I guess you felt the same way about Caroline."

"Well, they've sowed 'em, haven't they?"

"Not by a long shot. That's the trouble,—they don't get any forrider, from our point of view. I thought it would be the best policy to stand by and let Nancy work it out. I thought her restaurant would either fail spectacularly in a month, or succeed brilliantly and she'd make over the executive end of it to somebody else. I never thought of her buckling down like this, and wearing herself out at it."

"There's a pretty keen edge on Caroline this summer."

"I'm afraid Nancy's in pretty deep," Dick said. "The money end of it worries me as much as anything."

"I wouldn't let that worry me."

"She won't take any of mine, you know."

"I know she won't. See here, Dick, I wouldn't worry about Nancy's finances. She'll come out all right about money."

"What makes you think so?"

"I know so. We've got lots of things in the world to worry about, things that are scheduled to go wrong unless we're mighty delicate in the way we handle 'em. Let's worry about them, and leave Nancy's financial problems to take care of themselves."

"Which means," Dick said, "that you are sure that she's all right. I'm not in her confidence in this matter—"

"Well, I am," Billy said, "I'm her legal adviser, and with all due respect to your taste in girls, it's a very difficult position to occupy. What with the things she won't listen to and the things she won't learn, and the things she actually knows more about than I do—"

The indulgent smile of the true lover lit Dick's face, as if Billy had waxed profoundly eulogistic. Unconsciously, Billy's own tenderness took fire at the flame.

"Why don't we run away with 'em?" he said, breathing heavily.

Dick stopped in a convenient doorway to light his third cigarette, end on.

"It's the answer to you and Caroline," he said.

"Why not to you and Nancy?"

"It may be," Dick said, "I dunno. I've reached an impasse. Still there is a great deal in your proposition."

They turned in at the portico that extended out over the big oak doors of their club. An attendant in white turned the knob for them, with the grin of enthusiastic welcome that was the usual tribute to these two good-looking, well set up young men from those who served them.

"I'll think it over," Dick added, as he gave up his hat and stick, "and let you know what decision I come to."

In another five minutes they were deep in a game of Kelly-pool from which Dick emerged triumphantly richer by the sum of a dollar and ninety cents, and Billy the poorer by the loss of a quarter.

* * * * *

There is a town in Connecticut, within a reasonable motoring distance from New York that has been called the Gretna Green of America. Here well-informed young couples are able to expedite the business of matrimony with a phenomenal neatness and despatch. Licenses can be procured by special dispensation, and the nuptial knot tied as solemnly and solidly as if a premeditated train of bridesmaids and flower girls and loving relatives had been rehearsed for days in advance.

Dick and his Rolls-Royce had assisted at a hymeneal celebration or two, where a successful rush had been made for the temporary altars of this beneficent town with the most felicitous results, and he knew the procedure. When he and Billy organized an afternoon excursion into Connecticut, they tacitly avoided all mention of the consummation they hoped to bring about, but they both understood the nature and significance of the expedition. Dick,—who was used to the easy accomplishment of his designs and purposes, for most obstacles gave way before his magnetic onslaught,—had only sketchily outlined his scheme of proceedings, but he trusted to the magic of that inspiration that seldom or never failed him. He was the sort of young man that the last century novelists always referred to as "fortune's favorite," and his luck so rarely betrayed him that he had almost come to believe it to be invincible.

His general idea was to get Nancy and Caroline to drive into the country, through the cool rush of the freer purer air of the suburbs, give them lunch at some smart road-house, soothingly restful and dim, where the temperature was artificially lowered, and they could powder their noses at will; and from thence go on until they were within the radius of the charmed circle where modern miracles were performed while the expectant bridegroom waited.

"Nancy, my dear, we are going to be married,"—that he had formulated, "we're going to be done with all this nonsense of waiting and doubting the evidence of our own senses and our own hearts. We're going to put an end to the folly of trying to do without each other,—your folly of trying to feed all itinerant New York; my folly of standing by and letting you do it, or any other fool thing that your fancy happens to dictate. You're mine and I'm yours, and I'm going to take you—take you to-day and prove it to you." This was to be timed to be delivered at just about the moment when they drew up in front of the office of the justice of the peace, who was Dick's friend of old. "Hold up your head, my dear, and put your hat on straight; we're going into that building to be made man and wife, and we're not coming out of it until the deed has been done." In some such fashion, he meant to carry it through. Many a time in the years gone by he had steered Nancy through some high-handed escapade that she would only have consented to on the spur of the moment. She was one of these women who responded automatically to the voice of a master. He had failed in mastery this last year or so. That was the secret of his failure with her, but the days of that failure were numbered now. He was going to succeed.

On the back seat of the big car he expected Billy and Caroline to be going through much the same sort of scene.

"We've come to a show-down now, Caroline,—either I sit in this game, or get out." He could imagine Billy bringing Caroline bluntly to terms with comparatively little effort. That was what she needed—Caroline—a strong hand. Billy's problem was simple. Caroline had already signified her preference for him. She wore his ring. Billy had only to pick her up, kicking and screaming if need be, and bear her to the altar. She would marry him if he insisted. That was clear to the most superficial of observers,—but Nancy was different.

The day was hot, and grew steadily hotter. By the time Nancy and Caroline were actually in the car, after an almost superhuman effort to assemble them and their various accessories of veils and wraps, and to dispose of the assortment of errands and messages that both girls seemed to be committed to despatch before they could pass the boundaries of Greater New York, the two men were very nearly exhausted. It was only when the chauffeur let the car out to a speed greatly in excess of the limitations on some clear stretch of road, that the breath of the country brought them any relief whatsoever.

Dick looked over his shoulder at the two in the back seat, and noted Caroline's pallor, and the fact that she was allowing a listless hand to linger in Billy's; but when he turned back to Nancy he discovered no such encouraging symptoms. She was sitting lightly relaxed at his side, but there was nothing even negatively responsive in her attitude. Her color was high; her breath coming evenly from between her slightly parted lips. She looked like a child oblivious to everything but some innocent daydream.

"You look as if you were dreaming of candy and kisses, Nancy,—are you?" he asked presently.

"No, I'm just glad to be free. It's been a long time since I've played hooky."

"I know it." The "dear" constrained him, and he did not add it: "You've been working most unholy hard. I—I hate to have you."

"But I was never so happy in my life."

"That's good." His voice hoarsened with the effort to keep it steady and casual. "Is everything going all right?"

"Fine."

"Is—is the money end of it all right?"

"Yes, that is, I am not worrying about money."

"You're not making money?"

"No."

"You are not losing any?"

"I am—a little. That was to be expected, don't you think so?"

"How much are you losing?"

"I don't know exactly."

"You ought to know. Are you keeping your own books?"

"Betty helps me."

"Are you losing a hundred a month?"

"Yes."

"Five hundred?"

"I suppose so."

"A thousand?"

"I don't really know."

"A thousand?" he insisted.

"Yes," Nancy answered recklessly, "the way I run it."

"It doesn't make any difference, of course;" Dick said, "you've got all my money behind you."

"I haven't anybody's money behind me except my own."

"You had fifteen thousand dollars. Do you mean to say that you have any of that left to draw on?"

"No, I don't."

"Do you mind telling me how you are managing?"

"Billy borrowed some money for me."

"On what security?"

"I don't know."

"Why didn't he come to me?"

"I told him not to."

"Nancy, do you realize that you're the most exasperating woman that ever walked the face of this earth?" the unhappy lover asked.

Nancy managed to convey the fact that Dick's asseveration both surprised and pained her, without resorting to the use of words.

"I wish you wouldn't spoil this lovely party," she said to him a few seconds later. "I'm extremely tired, and I should like to get my mind off my business instead of going over these tiresome details with anybody."

"You look very innocent and kind and loving," Dick said desperately, "but at heart you're a little fraud, Nancy."

She interrupted him to point out two children laden with wild flowers, trudging along the roadside.

"See how adorably dirty and happy they are," she cried. "That little fellow has his shoestrings untied, and keeps tripping on them, he's so tired, but he's so crazy about the posies that he doesn't care. I wonder if he's taking them home to his mother."

"You're devoted to children, Nancy, aren't you?" Dick's voice softened.

"Yes, I am, and some day I'm going to adopt a whole orphan asylum,"—her voice altered in a way that Dick did not in the least understand. "I could if I wanted to," she laughed. "Maybe I will want to some day. So many of my ideas are being changed and modified by experience."

The road-house of his choice, when they reached it, proved to have deteriorated sadly since his last visit. The cool interior that he remembered had been inopportunely opened to the hottest blast of the day's heat, and hermetically sealed again, or at least so it seemed to Dick; and the furniture was all red and thickly, almost suffocatingly, upholstered. Nancy had no comment on the torrid air of the dining-room,—she rarely complained about anything. Even the presence of a fly in her bouillon jelly scarcely disturbed her equanimity, but Dick knew that she was secretly sustained by the conviction that such an accident was impossible under her system of supervision at Outside Inn, and resented her tranquillity accordingly.

Caroline, behaving not so well, seemed to him a much more human and sympathetic figure, though her nose took on a high shine unknown to Nancy's demurer and more discreetly served features; but Billy evidently preferred Nancy's deportment, which was on the surface calm and reassuring.

"Nancy's a sport," he pointed out to Caroline enthusiastically, "no fly in the ointment gets her goat. She enjoys herself even when she's perfectly miserable."

"She doesn't feel the heat the way I do," Caroline snapped.

"I feel the heat," Nancy said, "but I—"

"She's got a system," Dick cut in savagely: "she stands it just as long as she can, and then she takes it out of me in some diabolical fashion."

Nancy's gray-blue eyes took on the far-away look that those who loved her had learned to associate with her most baffling moments.

"Just by being especially nice to Dick," she said thoughtfully, "I can make him more furious with me than in any other way."

Nancy and Caroline finished their sloppy ices at the table together while Dick and Billy sought the solace of a pipe in the garage outside.

"I don't understand coming into Connecticut to-day," Nancy said as soon as they were alone; "it seems like such a stupid excursion for Dick to make. He's usually pretty good at picking out places to go. In fact, he has a kind of genius for it."

"He slipped up this time," Caroline said, "I'm so hot."

"So am I," said Nancy, slumping limply into the depths of her red velour chair. "I want to get back to New York. Oh! what was it you told me the other day that you had been saving up to tell me?"

Caroline brightened.

"Oh, yes! Why, it was something Collier Pratt said about you. You know Betty has scraped up quite an acquaintance with him. She goes and sits down at his table sometimes."

"She's going to be stopped doing that," Nancy said.

"Well, you remember the night when you went home early with a headache, and passed by his table going out?"

"Yes, but I didn't know he saw me."

"He sees everything, Betty says."

"He didn't suspect me?"

"He didn't know you came out of the interior. He said to Betty, 'It's curious that Miss Martin never stays here to dine in the evening, though she so often drops in.' Betty is pretty quick, you know. She said, 'I think Miss Martin is a friend of the proprietor.'"

"So I am," said Nancy, "the best friend she's got. Go on, dear."

"Then he said slowly and thoughtfully, 'It's a crime for a woman like that not to be the mother of children. If ever I saw a maternal type, Miss Ann Martin is the apotheosis of it. Why some man hasn't made her understand that long ago I can not see.'"

Nancy's cheeks burned crimson and then white again.

"How dare Betty?" she said.

"Wait till you hear. You know Betty doesn't care what she says. Her reply to that was peculiarly Bettyish. She sighed and cast down her eyes,—the little imp! 'The course of true love never does run smooth,' she said; 'perhaps Ann has discovered the truth of that old saying in some new connection.' She didn't mean to be a cat, she was only trying to create a romantic interest in your affairs, doing as she would be done by. The effect was more than she bargained for though. Collier Pratt's eyes quite lit up. 'I can imagine no greater crime than frustrating the instincts of a woman like that,' he said. Imagine that—the instincts—whereupon Betty, of course, flounced off and left him."

"She would," Nancy said. Then a storm of real anger surged through her. "I'll turn her out of my place to-morrow. I'll never look at her or speak to her again."

"I think it would be more to the point," Caroline said, "to turn out Collier Pratt. That was certainly an extraordinary way for him to speak of you to a girl who is a stranger to him."

"Caroline, you're almost as bad as Betty is. You're both of you hopelessly—helplessly—provincially American. I don't think that was extraordinary or impertinent even," Nancy said. "I—I understand how that man means things."

* * * * *

The car drove up in front of the office of the justice of the peace in the town beyond that in which they had had their unauspicious luncheon party.

"Are we stopping here for any particular reason?" Caroline said.

Nancy had not spoken in more than a monosyllable since they had resumed their places in the car again.

"Not now," Dick said wearily. "I thought I'd point out the sights of the town. This place is called the Gretna Green of America, you know. A great many runaway couples come out here to be married. The man inside that office, the one with whiskers and no collar, is the one that marries them."

"Does he?" Billy asked a trifle uncertainly.

Nancy turned to Dick with a real appeal in her voice. It was the first time during the day that she had addressed him with anything like her natural tenderness and sweetness.

"Oh! Dick, can't we start on?" she said.



CHAPTER VIII

SCIENCE APPLIED

Gaspard was ill—very ill. He lay in the little anteroom at the top of the stairs and groaned thunderously. He had a pain in his back and a roaring in his head, and an extreme disorder in the region of his solar plexus.

"Sure an' he's no more nor less than a human earthquake," Michael reported after an examination.

Nancy applied ice caps and hot-water bags to the afflicted areas without avail. The stricken man had struggled from his bed in the Twentieth Street lodging-house that he had chosen for his habitation, and staggered through the heavy morning heat to his post in the basement kitchen of Nancy's Inn, there to collapse ignominiously between his cooking ranges. With Molly and Dolly and Hildeguard at his feet and herself and Michael and a dishwasher at his head they had managed to get him up the two short flights of stairs. It developed that it would be necessary to remove him in an ambulance later in the day, but for the time being he lay like a contorted Colossus on the fragile-looking cot that constituted his improvised bed of pain: "Like the great grandfather," to quote Michael again, "of all of them Zeus'es and gargoyles, and other cavortin' gentlemen in the yard down-stairs."

With the luncheon menu before her, Nancy decided that the hour had come for her to prove herself. She had assumed the practical management of the business of the Inn only to have the responsibility and much of the authority of her position taken from her by the very efficiency of her staff. She was far too good a business woman not to realize that this condition was distinctly to her advantage, and to encourage it accordingly, but there was still so much of the child in her that she secretly resented every usurpation of privilege.

With Gaspard ill she was able to manipulate the affairs of the kitchen exactly as she chose, and even in the moment of applying the "hot at the base of the brain and the cold at the forehead" that the doctor had prescribed as the most effective method for relieving the pressure of blood in the tortured temples of the suffering man, she had been conscious of that thrill of triumph that most human beings feel when the involuntary removal of the man higher up invests them with power.

Michael did the marketing, and the list went through as Gaspard had planned it, with some slight adaptations to the exigency, such as the substitution of twenty-five cans of tomato soup for the fresh vegetables with which Gaspard had planned to make his tomato bisque, and brandied peaches in glass jars instead of peach souffle.

"If I allow myself a little handicap in the matter of details," she said, "I know I can put everything else through as well as Gaspard;" whereupon she enveloped herself in a huge linen apron, tucked her hair into one of the chef's white caps, and attacked the problem of preparing luncheon for from sixty-five to two hundred people, who were scheduled to appear at uncertain intervals between the hours of twelve and two-thirty. Later she must be ready to serve tea and ices to a problematical number of patrons, but she tried not to think beyond the immediate task.

She could make a very good tomato bisque by adding one cup of milk and a dash of cream to one half-pint can of MacDonald's tomato soup, enough to serve three people adequately, and she proceeded to multiply that recipe by twenty-five. She didn't think of getting large cans till Michael in the process of opening the half-pint tins made the belated suggestion, which she greeted with some hauteur.

"I'm not the person to mind a little extra work, Michael, when I am sure of my results. Precision—that's the secret of the difference between American and French cooking."

"An' sure and I fail to see the difference between the preciseness of a quart can and four half-pint ones, but I suppose it's my ignorance now."

"Your supposition is correct, Michael," she said airily, but out of the corner of her eye she saw him smiling to himself over the growing heap of half-pint tins, and reddened with mortification at her naivete in the matter.

She looked at the vat of terra-cotta puree with considerable dismay when she had stirred in the last measure of cream. Twenty-five pints of tomato bisque is a rather formidable quantity of a liquid the chief virtue of which is its sparing and judicious introduction into the individual diet scheme. Nancy hardly felt that she wanted to be alone with it.

"They'll soon lick it all up, and be polishing their plates like so many Tom-cats," Michael said, indicating their potential patronage by waving his hand toward the courtyard. "Here comes Miss Betty, now. She'll be after lending a hand in the cooking."

"Keep her away, Michael," Nancy cried; "go out and head her off. Make her go up-stairs and sit with Gaspard,—anything, but don't let her come in here. If she does I won't answer for the consequences. I'll—I'll—I don't know what I'll do to her."

"Throw her in the soup kettle, most likely," Michael chuckled. "Faith, an' I never saw a woman yet that wasn't ready to scratch the eyes out of the next one that got into her kitchen."

"She isn't safe," Nancy said darkly. "I need every bit of brain and self-control I have to put this luncheon through. You keep Miss Betty's mind on something else—anything but me and the way I am doing the cooking."

"'Tis done," said Michael; "sure an' I'll protect her from you, if I have to abduct her myself!"

"I wish he would," Nancy said to herself viciously, "before she gets another chance at Collier Pratt.—Creamed chicken and mushrooms. It's a lucky thing that Gaspard diced the chicken last night, and fixed that macedoine of vegetables for a garnish.—She's a dangerous woman; she might wreck one's whole life with her unfeeling, histrionic nonsense.—I wonder if thirteen quarts of cream sauce is going to be enough."

It turned out to be quite enough after the crises in which the butter basis got too brown, and the flour after melting into it smoothly seemed unreasonably inclined to lump again as Nancy stirred the cold milk into it, but the result after all was perfectly adequate, except for the uncanny brown tinge that the whole mixture had taken on. Nancy was unable to restrain herself from taking a sample of it to Gaspard's bedside.

"Mais—but I can not eat it now," he cried, misunderstanding the purpose of her visit, "nor again—nor ever again. Jamais!"

"I don't want you to eat it, Gaspard, I want you to look at it, and tell me what makes it that color. It turned tan, you see. I don't want to poison any one."

"I am too miserable," Gaspard said. "The sauce—you have made into Bechamel with the browning butter, voila tout. It is better so,—it would not hurt any one in the world but me—and me it would kill."

"Poor thing," sighed Nancy, as she took her place by the kitchen dresser again, trying to remember where she had last seen brown eyes that reflected the look of stricken endurance that glazed Gaspard's velvet orbs, recalled with a start that Dick had gazed at her in much the same helpless fashion on their drive home from their recent motor trip in Connecticut. She had been too absorbed in her own distresses to consider anybody's state of mind but her own, on that occasion, but now Dick's expression came back to her vividly, and she nearly ruined a big bowl of French dressing, at the crucial moment of putting in the vinegar, trying to imagine which one of the events of that inauspicious day might conceivably have caused it.

After the actual serving of the meal began, however, she had very little time for reflection or reminiscence. The distribution of food to the waitresses as they called for it required the full concentration of her powers. Molly and Dolly coached her, and with their assistance she was soon able to fill the bewilderingly rapid orders from the line of girls stretching from the door to the open space in front of her serving-table, which never seemed to diminish however adequately its demands were met.

Mechanically she took soup and meat dishes from the hooded shelves at the top of the range where they were kept warming, and ladled out the brick-colored bisque, the creamed chicken and garnishing of the individual orders. The chicken looked delicious with its accompaniment of vari-colored vegetables,—Nancy had done away with the side dish long since—and each serving was assembled with special reference to its decorative qualities. The girls went up-stairs to put the salad on the plates, where the desserts were already dished in the quaint blue bowls in which stewed fruits and the more fluid sweets were always served.

In her mind's eye Nancy could see the picture. At noon the court was almost entirely in the shade, and instead of the awning top, which shut out the air, there were gay striped umbrellas at the one or two tables that were imperfectly protected from the sun. She had recently invested in some table-cloths with bright blue woven borders. Flowers were arranged in low bowls and baskets on respective tables. Nancy instinctively grouped tired young business men in blue serge and soft collars at the tables decorated with the baskets of blue flowers; and pale young women in lingerie blouses before the bowls of roses. She could see them,—those big-eyed girls with delicate blue veins accentuating the pallor of their white faces—sinking gratefully into the wicker seats and benches, and sniffing rapturously at the faint far-away fragrance of the woodland blossoms.

"I hope they will steal a great many of them," she thought, for her patrons were given to despoiling her flower vases in a way that scandalized the good Hildeguard, who was a just but ungenerous soul in spite of her ample proportions and popular qualities. Molly and Dolly were rather given to encouraging the vandals, knowing that they had Nancy's tacit approval.

Automatically dipping the huge metal ladle—one filling of which was enough for a service—into the big soup kettle, she stood for a moment gazing into its magenta depths oblivious to everything but the rhapsodic consideration of her realized dream. Now for the first time she was contributing directly her own strength and energy to the public which she served. She had prepared with her own hands the meal which her grateful patrons were consuming. The little girls with the tired faces, the jaded men, the smart, weary business women—buyers and secretaries and modistes,—who were occupied in the neighborhood were all being literally nourished by her. She had actually manufactured the product that was to sustain them through the weary day of heat and effort.

"How do they like the lunch, Molly?" she asked, as she deftly deposited the forty-fifth serving of chicken with Bechamel sauce on the exact center of the plate before her. "Are they pleased with the soup? Are they saying complimentary things about the chicken?"

"Some of them is, Miss Nancy. Some of them is complaining that they can't get any other kind of soup. Them that usually gets invalid broth don't understand our running out of it."

"I forgot about the specials," Nancy cried.

"That red-haired girl that we feed on custards and nut bread and that special cocoa Gaspard makes for her, she acted real bad. They get expecting certain things, and then they want them."

"I'm sorry," Nancy said; "I'll make all those things to-morrow."

"The old feller that always has the stewed prunes is terrible pleased though. I give him two helps of the peaches, and he wanted another. He was pleased to get white bread too. He complains something dreadful about his bran biscuit every day."

"I meant to send to the woman's exchange for different kinds of health bread, but I forgot it," Nancy moaned. "Do they like the peaches at all?"

"Most of them likes them too well. There was one old lady that got one whiff of them, and pushed back her chair and left. I guess she had took the pledge, and the brandy went against her principles."

"I never thought of that. I only thought that brandied peaches would be a treat to so many people who didn't have them habitually served at home."

The picture in Nancy's mind changed in color a trifle. She could see sour-faced spinsters at single tables pushing back their chairs, overturning the rose bowls in their hurry to shake the dust of her restaurant from their feet.

"Don't accept any money from people who don't like their luncheon," she admonished Molly, who was next in line with several orders to be filled at once. "Tell them that the proprietor of Outside Inn prefers not to be paid unless the meal is entirely satisfactory."

"I'm afraid there wouldn't never be any satisfactory meals if I told them that, Miss Nancy."

"I don't want any one ever to pay for anything he doesn't like," Nancy insisted. "Slip the money back in their coat pockets if you can't manage it any other way."

"There's lots of complaints about the soup," Dolly said; "so many people don't like tomato in the heat. Gaspard, he always had a choice even if it wasn't down on the menu. I might deduct, say fifteen cents now, and slip it back to them with their change."

"Please do," Nancy implored. "Tell Molly and Hildeguard."

"Hilda would drop dead, but Molly'd like the fun of it."

It was hot in the kitchen. The soup kettle bad been emptied of more than half its contents, but the liquid that was left bubbled thickly over the gas flame that had been newly lit to reheat it. The pungent, acrid odor of hot tomatoes affronted her nostrils. She had a vision now of the pale tired faces of the little stenographers turning in disgust from the contemplation of the flamboyant and sticky puree on their plates, annoyed by the color scheme in combination with the soft wild-rose pink of the table bouquets, if not actually sickened by the fluid itself. For the first time since his abrupt seizure that morning she began to hope in her heart that Gaspard's illness might be a matter of days instead of weeks. She served Hildeguard and one of the other waitresses with more soup, and then began to boil some eggs to eke out the chicken, which, owing to her unprecedented generosity in the matter of portions, seemed to be diminishing with alarming rapidity.

From the kitchen closet beyond came the clatter of dishwashing, the interminable splashing of water, and stacking of plates, punctuated by the occasional clang of smashing glass or pottery. She had discharged two dishwashers in less than two weeks' time, with the natural feeling that any change in that department must be for the better, but the present incumbent was even more incompetent than his predecessors. Even Nancy's impregnable nerves began to feel the strain of the continual clamorous assault on them.

Betty appeared in the doorway that led directly from the restaurant stairs.

"I'm sorry to intrude," she said. "Don't blame Michael, I'm breaking my parole to get in here. He locked me in and made me swear I'd keep out of the kitchen before he'd let me out at all, but I had to tell you this. The tomato soup has curdled and you ought not to serve it any more."

"Well, I thought it looked rather funny," Nancy moaned.

"It won't do anybody any harm, you know. It just looks bad, and a lot of people are kicking about it. Did Molly tell you about the old fellow that got tipsy on the peaches?"

"No, she didn't. I sent Michael out for some ripe peaches and other fruit to serve instead."

"That's a good idea. How's the food holding out? There are lots of people you know up-stairs," she rattled on, for Nancy, who was getting more and more distraught with each disquieting detail, made no pretense of answering her. "Dolly has probably kept you informed. Dick's aunt is here, and that terribly highbrow cousin of Caroline's; and that good-looking young surgeon that suddenly got so famous last winter, and admired you so much. Dr. Sunderland—isn't that his name? I never saw Collier Pratt here for lunch before. There's a little girl with him, too."

"Collier Pratt?" Nancy cried, "Oh, Betty, he isn't here. He couldn't be. Don't frighten me with any such nonsense. He never comes here in the day-time."

"He is though," Betty said, "and a queer-looking little child with him, a dark-eyed little thing dressed in black satin."

"It seems a good deal to me as if you were making that up," Nancy cried in exasperation; "it's so much the kind of thing you do make up."

"I know it," Betty said, unexpectedly reasonable, "but as it happens I'm not. Collier Pratt really is up-stairs with a poor little orphan in tow. Ask any one of the girls."

At this moment Dolly, her ribbons awry and her china-blue eyes widened with excitement, appeared with a dramatic confirmation of Betty's astonishing announcement.

"There's a little girl took sick from the peaches, and moved up-stairs in the room next to Gaspard's," she cried breathlessly. "The doctor that was sitting at the next table, had her moved right up there. He wants to see the lady that runs the restaurant, and he wants a lot of hot water in a pitcher, and some baking soda."

"You see," Betty said, "go on up, I'll take your place here. Dolly, get the things the doctor asked for."

Nancy stripped off her cap and her apron and resigned her spoons and ladles to Betty without a word. She was still incredulous of what she would find at the top of the three flights of creaking age-worn stairs that separated her from the nest of rooms that were the storm quarters of her hostelry, now converted by a sudden malevolence on the part of fate into a temporary hospital. As she took the last flight she could hear Gaspard's stertorous breathing coming at the regular intervals of distressful slumber, and through that an ominous murmur of grave and low-voiced conference, such as one hears in the chambers of the dead. The convulsive application of a powder puff to the tip of her burning nose—her whole face was aflame with exertion and excitement—was merely a part of her whole subconscious effort to get herself in hand for the exigency. Her mind, itself, refused any preparation for the scene that awaited her.

On one of the cushioned benches against the wall in the most decorative of the dining-rooms of the up-stairs suite, a little girl was lying stark against the brilliant blue of the upholstery. She was a child of some seven or eight, lightly built and delicate of features and dressed all in black. Her eyes were closed, but the long lashes emphasizing the shadows in which they were set, prepared you for the revelation of them. Nancy understood that they were Collier Pratt's eyes, and that they would open presently, and look wonderingly up at her. She recognized the presence of Dr. Sunderland, of Michael and several of the waitresses, and a flighty woman in blue taffeta—an ubiquitous patron,—but she made her way past them at once, and sank on her knees before the prostrate child.

"It's nothing very serious, Miss Martin," the young surgeon reassured her, "delicate children of this type are likely to have these seizures. It's not exactly a fainting fit. It belongs rather to the family of hysteria."

"Wasn't it the peaches?" Nancy asked fearfully. "They—they had a little brandy in them."

"They may have been a contributing cause," Dr. Sunderland acknowledged, "but the child's condition is primarily responsible. Let her alone until she rouses,—then give her hot water with a pinch of soda in it at fifteen-minute intervals. Keep her feet hot and her head cold and don't try to move her until after dark, when it's cooler."

"All right," Nancy said, "I'll take care of her."

"Here comes her poor father, now," the lady in taffeta announced with the dramatic commiseration of the self-invited auditor. "He thought an iced towel on her head might make her feel better. Is the dear little thing an orphan—I mean a half orphan?"

The assembled company seeming disinclined to respond, she repeated her inquiry to Collier Pratt himself, as with the susceptive grace that characterized all his movements, he swung the compress he was carrying sharply to and fro to preserve its temperature in transit. "Is the poor little thing a half orphan?"

"The poor little thing is nine-tenths orphan, madam," said Collier Pratt, "that is—the only creature to whom she can turn for protection is the apology for a parent that you see before you. Would you mind stepping aside and giving me a little more room to work in?"

"Not at all." Irony was wasted on the indomitable sympathizer in blue. "Hasn't she really anybody but you to take care of her?"

Collier Pratt arranged the towel precisely in position over the little girl's forehead, smoothing with careful fingers the cloud of dusky hair that fell about her face.

"She has not," he answered with some savagery.

"Hasn't she any women friends or relatives that would be willing to take charge of her?"

"No, madam."

"Then some woman that has no child of her own to care for ought to adopt her, and relieve you of the responsibility. It's a shame and disgrace the way these New York women with no natural ties of their own go around crying for something to do, when there are sweet little children like this suffering for a mother's care. I'd adopt her myself if I was able to. I certainly would."

"I'm perfectly willing to give over the technical part of her bringing up to some one of the women whom you so feelingly describe," Collier Pratt said. "The trouble is to find the woman—the right woman. The vicarious mother is not the most prevalent of our modern types, I regret to say."

The little girl on the couch stirred softly, and the hand that Nancy was holding, a pathetic, thin, unkempt little hand, grew warm in hers. The lids of the big eyes fluttered and lifted. Nancy looked into their clouded depths for an instant. Then she turned to Collier Pratt decisively.

"I'll take care of your little girl for you, if you will let me," she said.



CHAPTER IX

SHEILA

"I had mal de mer when I was on the steamer," the child said, in her pretty, painstaking English—she spoke French habitually. "I do not like to have it on the land. The gentleman in there," she pointed to the room beyond where Gaspard was again distressfully sleeping the sleep of the spent after a period of the most profound physical agitation, "he does not like to have it, too,—I mean either."

Nancy had propped the little girl up on improvised pillows made of coats and wraps swathed in towels and covered her with some strips of canton flannel designed to use as "hushers" under the table covers. As soon as the intense discomfort and nausea that had followed the first period of faintness had passed, Nancy had slipped off the shabby satin dress, made like the long-sleeved kitchen apron of New England extraction, and attired the child in a craftily simulated night-gown of table linen. Collier Pratt had worked with her, deftly supplementing all her efforts for his little girl's comfort until she had fallen into the exhausted sleep from which she was only now rousing and beginning to chatter. Her father had left her, still sleeping soundly, in Nancy's care, and gone off to keep an appointment with a prospective picture buyer. He had made no comment on Nancy's sudden impulsive offer to take the child in charge, and neither she nor he had referred to the matter again.

"Are you comfortable now, Sheila?" Nancy asked. She had expected the child to have a French name, Suzanne or Japonette or something equally picturesque, but she realized as soon as she heard it that Sheila was much more suitable. The cloudy blue-black hair, and steel-blue eyes, the slight elongation of the space between the upper lip and nose, the dazzling satin whiteness of the skin were all Irish in their suggestion. Was the child's mother—that other natural protector of the child, who had died or deserted her—Nancy tried not to wonder too much which it was that she had done,—an Irish girl, or was Collier Pratt himself of that romantic origin?

"Oui, Mademoiselle, I mean, yes, thank you. I do not think I will say to you Miss Martin. We only say their names like that to the people with whom we are not intime. We are intime now, aren't we, now that I have been so very sick chez vous? In Paris the concierge had a daughter that I called Mademoiselle Cherie, and we were very intime. I think I would like to call you Miss Dear in English after her."

"I should like that very much," Nancy said.

"I am glad the sick gentleman is called Gaspard. So many messieurs—I mean gentlemen in Paris are called Gaspard, and hardly any in the United States of America. American things are very different from things in Paris, don't you think so, Miss Dear?"

"I'm afraid they are," Nancy acquiesced gravely.

"I'm afraid they are too," the child said, "but afraid is what I try not to be of them. My father says America is full of beasts and devils, but he does not mind because he can paint them."

"Do you live in a studio?" Nancy asked after a struggle to prevent herself from asking the question. She felt that she had no right to any of the facts about Collier Pratt's existence that he did not choose to volunteer for himself.

"Yes, Miss Dear, but not like Paris. There we had a door that opened into a garden, and the birds sang there, and I was allowed to go and play. Here we have only a fire-escape, and the concierge is only a janitor and will not allow us to keep milk bottles on it. I do not like a janitor. Concierges have so much more politesse. Now, no one takes care of me when father goes out, or brings me soup or gateaux when he forgets."

"Does he forget?" Nancy cried, horrified.

"Sometimes. He forgets himself, too, very often except dinner. He remembers that because he likes to come to this Outside Inn restaurant, where the cooking is so good. He brought me here to-day because it was my birthday. I think the cooking is very good except that I was so sick of eating it, but father swore to-day that it was not."

"Swore?"

"He said damn. That is not very bad swearing. I think nom de Dieu is worse, don't you, Miss Dear?"

"I'm going to take you up in my arms," said Nancy with sudden passion. "I want to feel how thin you are, and I want to feel how you—feel."

"Why, your eyes are wetting," the little girl exclaimed as she nestled contentedly against Nancy's breast, where Nancy had gathered her, converted table-cloth and all.

"It's your not having enough to eat," Nancy cried. "Oh! baby child, honey. How could they? It's your calling me Miss Dear, too," she said. "I—I can't stand the combination."

The child patted her cheek consolingly.

"Don't cry," she said; "my father cries because I get so hungry, when he forgets, but he does forget again as soon."

"Would you like to come and live with me, Sheila?" Nancy asked.

"I think so, Miss Dear."

"Then you shall," Nancy said devoutly.

Collier Pratt found his child in Nancy's arms when he again mounted the stairs to the third floor of Outside Inn. The place was curiously cool to one who had been walking the sun-baked streets, and he gave an appreciative glance at the dim interior and the tableau of woman and child. Nancy's burnished head bent gravely over the shadowy dark one resting against her bosom.

"All right again, is she?" he inquired with the slow rare smile that Nancy had not seen before that day.

"Yes," Nancy said, "she's better. She's under-nourished, that's what the trouble is."

"I suspected that," Collier Pratt said ruefully. "I'm not specially talented as a parent. I feed her passionately for days, and then I stop feeding her almost entirely. Artists in my circumstances eat sketchily at best. The only reason that I am fed with any regularity is that I have the habit of coming to this restaurant of yours. By the way, is it yours? I found you in charge to-day to my amazement."

"I am in charge to-day," Nancy acknowledged; "in fact I have taken over the management of it for—for a friend."

"The mysterious philanthropist."

"Ye-es."

"Then I will refrain from any comment on the lunch to-day."

"Oh! that—that was a mistake," Nancy cried, "an experiment. Gaspard the chef—was ill."

"He was very ill, father, dear," Sheila added gravely, "like crossing the Channel, much sicker than I was. I was only sick like crossing the ocean, you know."

"These fine distinctions," Collier Pratt said, "she's much given to them." His eyes narrowed as they rested again on the picture Nancy made—the cool curve of her bent neck, the rise and fall of the breast in which the breathing had quickened perceptibly since his coming,—the child swathed in the long folds of white linen outlined against the Madonna blue of the dress that she was wearing. Nancy blushed under the intentness of his gaze, understanding, thanks to Caroline's report of his conversation with Betty, something of what was in his mind about her.

"Gaspard is going to be taken away in an ambulance," the child said, "to the hospital."

"Then who is going to cook my dinner?" Collier Pratt asked.

"Good lord, I don't know," Nancy cried, roused to her responsibilities.

She looked at the watch on her wrist, a platinum bracelet affair with an octagonal face that Dick had persuaded her to accept for a Christmas present by giving one exactly like it to Betty and Caroline. It was twenty-five minutes of five. Dinner was served every night promptly at half past six, and there was absolutely no preparation made for it, not so much as a loaf of bread ordered. Instead of doing the usual marketing in the morning she had sent Michael out for the things that she needed in the preparation of luncheon, and planned to make up a list of things that she needed for dinner just as soon as her midday duties in the kitchen had set her free. She thought that she would be more like Gaspard, "inspired to buy what is right" if she waited until the success of her luncheon had been assured. The ensuing events had driven the affairs of her cuisine entirely out of her mind. She was constrained by her native tendency to concentrate on the business in hand to the exclusion of all other matters, big and little. She had dismissed Betty during the excitement that followed Sheila's illness, and Betty had seemed unnaturally willing to leave the hectic scene and go about her business. Michael had made several ineffectual attempts to speak to her, but she had waved him away impatiently. She knew that neither he nor any one else on the restaurant staff would believe that she hadn't made some adequate and mysterious provision for the serving of the night meal. She had never failed before in the smallest detail of executive policy. She set the child back upon the cushion, and arranged her perfunctorily in position there.

"I don't know what you are going to have for dinner," she said, "much less who's going to cook it for you."

"Perhaps I had better arrange to have it elsewhere, since this seems to be literally the cook's day out."

"There'll be dinner," said Nancy uncertainly.

Dick came up the stairs three at a time, and in his wake she heard the murmur of women's voices—Caroline's and Betty's.

"I heard you were in difficulties," Dick said, "so I made Sister Betty and Caroline give up their perfectly good trip into the country, in order to come around and mix in."

"I didn't know Betty was going driving with you," Nancy said. "She didn't say so. Oh! Dick, there isn't any dinner. I forgot all about it. This is Mr. Collier Pratt and his little daughter,—Mr. Richard Thorndyke. She's coming to live with me soon, I hope, and let Hitty take care of her."

The two men shook hands.

"Hold on a minute," Dick said, "that paragraph is replete with interest, but I want to get it assimilated. Sure, Betty was going driving with me. I told her to ask you if she thought it would be any use, but she allowed it wouldn't. I am delighted to meet Mr. Pratt, and pleased to know that his daughter is coming to live with you, but isn't that rather sudden? Also, what's this about there not being any dinner?"

"There isn't," Nancy was beginning, when she realized that Caroline and Betty, who had followed closely on Dick's footsteps, were looking at her with faces pale with consternation and alarm. She could see the anticipatory collapse of Outside Inn writ large on Caroline's expressive countenance. Caroline was the type of girl who believed that in the very nature of things the undertakings of her most intimate friends were doomed to failure. "There isn't any dinner yet," Nancy corrected herself, "but you go up to my place, Dick, and get Hitty. Tell her she's got to cook dinner for this restaurant to-night. She can cook three courses of anything she likes, and have carte blanche in the kitchen. You have more influence with her than anybody, so, no matter what she says, make her do it. Then when she decides what she wants to cook, drive her around until she collects her ingredients. She won't let anybody do the marketing for her."

"All right," Dick said, "I'll do my best."

"You'll have to do more than that," Betty laughed as he started off, "but you're perfectly capable of it. How do you do, Mr. Pratt? This is Miss Eustace, pale with apprehension about the way things are going, but still recognizable and answering to her name." Betty always enjoyed introducing Caroline with an audacious flourish, since Caroline always suffered so much in the process.

"And this is little Miss Sheila Pratt," Nancy supplemented.

"Enchante," the little girl said, "I mean, I am very pleased to meet you. I was very sick, but I am better now, and I am going to live with Miss Dear."

"It seems to be settled," her father said, shrugging.

"Would you mind it so very much?" Nancy asked.

"I wouldn't mind it at all," Collier Pratt said. "I think it would be a delightful arrangement,—if I'm to take you seriously."

"Nancy is always to be taken seriously," Betty put in. "What she really wants of the child is to use her for dietetic experiment, I'm sure."

"That's what she's used to, poor child," Collier Pratt said ruefully.

The removal of Gaspard created a diversion. Nancy took Sheila in to bid him good-by, and the great creature was so touched by the farewell kiss that she imprinted on his forehead, and the revelation of the fact that a fellow being had been suffering kindred throes in the chamber just beyond his own that he was of two minds about letting himself be moved at all from her proximity. A group of waitresses collected on the second landing, and Nancy and her friends stood together at the head of the stairs while the white-coated intern from the hospital rolled his great bulk upon a fragile-looking stretcher, and with the assistance of all the male talent in the establishment, managed to head him down the stairs, and so on across the court and into the waiting ambulance.

Nancy's eyes filled with inexplicable tears, and she caught Collier Pratt regarding them with some amusement.

"He's such a dear," she said somewhat irrelevantly. "I really didn't care whether he was sick or not this morning,—but you get so fond of people that are around all the time."

"I don't," said Collier Pratt,—he spoke very lightly, but there was something in his tone that made Nancy want to turn and look at him intently. She seemed to see for the first time a shade of defiant cruelty in his face,—"I don't," he reiterated.

"I do," Nancy repeated stubbornly, but as she met his slow smile, the slight impression of unpleasantness vanished.

"We artists are selfish people," he said. "I'm going to run away now, and leave my daughter to cultivate your charming friends. Will you come and eat your dinner at my little table to-night, and talk, discuss this matter of her visit to you?"

"I will if there is any dinner," Nancy said, putting out a throbbing hand to him.

There was a dinner. It was Hitty's conception of an emergency meal—the kind of thing that her mother before her had prepared on wash-day when an unexpected relative alighted from the noon train, and surprised her into inadvertent hospitality. It began with steamed clams and melted butter sauce. Hitty knew a fish market where the clams were imported direct from Cape Cod by the nephew of a man who used to go to school with her husband's brother, and he warranted every clam she bought of him. They were served in soup plates and the drawn butter in demi-tasses, but Hitty would have it no other way. The piece de resistance was ham and eggs, great fragrant crispy slices of ham browned faintly gold across their pinky surface, and eggs—Hitty knew where to get country eggs, too—so white, so golden-yolked, so tempting that it was difficult to associate them with the prosaic process of frying, but fried they were. With them were served boiled potatoes in their jackets,—no wash-day cook ever removed the peeling from an emergency potato,—and afterward a course of Hitty's famous huckleberry dumplings, the lightest, most ephemeral balls of dumplings that were ever dipped into the blue-black deeps of hot huckleberry—not blueberry, but country huckleberry—sauce.

"Where's the coffee?" Nancy asked Dolly miserably, when the humiliating meal was drawing to its close.

"She won't make coffee," Dolly whispered; "she says it will keep everybody awake, and they're much better off without it, but Miss Betty, she's watching her chance, and she's making it."

Collier Pratt had received each course in silence, but had eaten heartily of the food that was set before him.

"I suppose he was hungry enough to eat anything," Nancy thought; "the lunch was humiliating enough, but this surpasses anything I dreamed of."

She had given up trying to estimate the calories that each man was likely to average in partaking of Hitty's menu. She noticed that a great many of her patrons had taken second helpings, and that threw her out in her calculation of quantities, while the relative digestibility of the protein and the fats in pork depend so much upon its preparation that she could not approximate the virtue of Hitty's bill of fare without consultation with Hitty.

"That was a very excellent dinner," Collier Pratt broke through her painful reverie to make his pronouncement. "Astonishing, but very satisfactory. It reminds me of days on my grandfather's farm when I was a youngster."

"I should think it might," Nancy said, for the first time in her relation with her new friend becoming ironical on her own account. Then she added seriously, "It's Hitty, you know, that will have all the real care of Sheila. I'm pretty busy down here, and I—" she hesitated, half expecting him to threaten to remove his child at once from the prospective guardianship of a creature who reverted so readily to the barbarism of ham and eggs.

"Well, if it's Hitty that is to have the care of Sheila," Collier Pratt said, and Nancy was not longer puzzled as to which element of her parentage Sheila owed her Irish complexion, "why, more power to her!"

Nancy dreamed that night that she was married to Dick, and that Hitty made and served them pate de foies gras dumplings, while Collier Pratt in freckles and overalls sat in a high chair, and had his dinner with the family. Later it was discovered that Betty had poisoned his bread and milk, and he died in Nancy's arms in dreadful agony, swearing in a beautiful Irish brogue that in all his life he had never looked at another woman,—which even in her dream seemed to Nancy a somewhat irreconcilable statement.



CHAPTER X

THE PORTRAIT

To Nancy's surprise Hitty welcomed the little girl warmly, when she was introduced into the family circle. She liked to be busy all day, and her duties in taking care of Nancy were not onerous enough to keep her full energy employed. She liked children and family life, and she seemed to have the feeling that if Nancy continued to assemble the various parts that go to make up a family, she would end by adding to it the essential masculine element, though it was Dick and not Collier Pratt that she visualized at the head of the table cutting up Sheila's meat for her. Collier Pratt was to her a necessary but insignificant detail in Nancy's scheme of things, a poor artist who had "frittered away so much time in furrin parts" that he was incapable of supporting his only child—"poor little motherless lamb!"—in anything like a befitting and adequate manner. Whenever he came to see Sheila she treated him with the condescension of a poor relation, and served his tea in the second best china with the kitchen silver and linen, unless Nancy caught her at it in time to demand the best.

Nancy had expected that Collier Pratt would try to make some business arrangement with her when she took Sheila in charge,—that he would insist on paying her at least a nominal sum a week for the child's board. She had lain awake nights planning the conversations with him in which she would overcome his delicate but natural scruples in the matter and persuade him to her own way of thinking. She had even fixed on the smallest sum—two dollars and a half a week—at which she thought she might induce him to compromise, if all her eloquence failed. She knew that he considered her the hard working, paid manager of Outside Inn, and took it for granted that she had no other source of income. She was a little disconcerted that he made no effort, beyond thanking her sincerely and simply for her kindness, to put the matter on a more concrete basis, but when he told her presently that he was going to do a portrait of her, she scourged herself for her New England perspective on an affair that he handled with so much delicacy.

Her friends were, on the whole, pleased with her experiment in vicarious motherhood. Dick instinctively resented the fact that Nancy had taken Collier Pratt's daughter into her home and heart, but the child herself was a delight to him, and he spent hours romping with her and telling her stories, loading her with toys and sweetmeats, and taking her off for enchanting holiday excursions "over the Palisades and far away." Billy was hardly less diverted with her, and Betty regarded her advent as a provision on the part of Providence against things becoming too commonplace. Caroline, as was her wont, took the child very seriously, and tried to interest Nancy in all the latest educational theories for her development, including posture dancing, and potato raising.

Nancy herself had loved the child from the moment the big lustrous gray eyes opened, on the day of her sudden illness at Outside Inn, and looked confidingly up into hers. For the first time in her life her maternal ardor—the instinct which made her yearn to nourish and minister to a race—had concentrated on a single human being. Sheila, hungry for mothering, had turned to her with the simplicity of the people among whom she had been brought up, taking her sympathetic response as a matter of course; and the two were soon on the closest, most affectionate terms.

Sheila and Outside Inn divided Nancy's time to the practical exclusion of all other interests. She had, without realizing her processes, taken into her life artificial responsibilities in almost exact proportion to the normal ones of any woman who makes the choice of marriage rather than that of a career. She was doing housekeeping on a large scale,—she had a child to care for, and she felt that she had entirely disproved any lingering feeling in the mind of any one associated with her that she ought to marry,—at least that she ought to marry Dick.

No woman ought to marry for the sake of marrying, but she was growing to understand now that the experiences of love and marriage might be necessary to the true development of a woman like herself; that there might even be some tragedy in missing them. She was twenty-five, practically alone in the world, and the growing passion of her life was for a child that she had borrowed, and might be constrained to relinquish at any moment.

She was tired. The unaccustomed confinement of the long hours at the Inn, the strain of enduring the thick, almost unalleviated heat of an exceptionally humid New York summer, and the tension engendered by her various executive responsibilities, all told on her physically, and her physical condition in its turn reacted on her mind, till she was conscious of a nostalgia,—a yearning and a hunger for something that she could not understand or name, but that was none the less irresistible. She fell into strange moods of brooding and lassitude; but there were two connections in which her spirit and ambition never failed her. She never failed of interest in the distribution of food values to her unconscious patrons, and incidentally to Collier Pratt, or in directing the activities and diversions of Sheila.

She bathed and dressed the child with her own hands every morning, combed out the cloudy black hair, fine spun and wavy, that framed the delicate face, and accentuated the dazzling white and pink of her coloring. She had bought her a complete new wardrobe—she was spending money freely now on every one but herself—venturing on one dress at a time in fear and trepidation lest Collier Pratt should suddenly call her to account for her interference with his rights as a parent, but he seemed entirely oblivious of the fact that Sheila had changed her shabby studio black for the most cobwebby of muslins and linens, frocks that by virtue of their exquisite fineness cost Nancy considerably more than her own.

"I say to my father, 'See the pretty new gown that Miss Dear bought for me,' and my father says to me, 'Comb your hair straight back from your brow, and don't let your arms dangle from your shoulders.'" Sheila complained, "He sees so hard the little things that nobody sees—and big things like a dress or a hat he does not notice."

"Men are like that," Nancy said. "Last night when I put on my new rose-colored gown for the first time, your friend Monsieur Dick told me he had always liked that dress best of all."

"Comme il est drole, Monsieur Dick," Sheila said; "he asked me to grow up and marry him some day. He said I should sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam, and feast upon strawberries, sugar and cream—like the poetry."

"And what did you say?" Nancy asked.

"I said that I thought I should like to marry him if I ever got to be big enough,—but I was afraid I should not be bigger for a long time. Miss Betty said she would marry him if I was trop petite."

"What did Dick say to that?" Nancy could not forbear asking.

"He said she was very kind, and maybe the time might come when he would think seriously of her offer."

There was a feeling in Nancy's breast as if her heart had suddenly got up and sat down again. Betty bore no remotest resemblance to the pale kind girl, practically devoid of feminine allure, that Nancy had visualized as the mate for Dick, and frequently exhorted him to go in search of.

"Miss Betty was only making a joke," she told Sheila sharply.

"We were all making jokes, Miss Dear," Sheila explained.

"I have never loved any one in the world quite so much as I love you, Sheila," Nancy cried in sudden passion as the little girl turned her face up to be kissed, as she always did when the conversation puzzled her.

"I like being loved," Sheila said, sighing happily. "My father loves me,—when he is not painting or eating. He is very good to me, I think."

"Your father is a very wise man, Sheila," Nancy said, "he understands beautiful things that other people don't know anything about. He looks at a flower and knows all about it, and—and what it needs to make it flourish. He looks at people that way, too."

"But he doesn't always have time to get the flower what it wants," Sheila said; "my jessamine died in Paris because he forgot to water them."

"Your father needs taking care of himself, Sheila. We must plan ways of trying to make him more comfortable. Don't you think of something that he needs that we could get for him?"

"More socks—he would like," Sheila said unexpectedly. "When his socks get holes in them he will not wear them. He stops whatever he is doing to mend them, and the mends hurt him. He mends my stockings, too, sometimes, but I like better the holes especially when he mends them on my feet."

Sheila could have presented no more appealing picture of her father to Nancy's vivid imagination. Collier Pratt with the incongruous sewing equipment of the unaccustomed male, using, more than likely, black darning cotton on a white sock—Nancy's mental pictures were always full of the most realistic detail—bent tediously over a child's stocking, while the precious sunlight was streaming unheeded upon the waiting canvas. She darned very badly herself, but the desire was not less strong in her to take from him all these preposterous and unbefitting tasks, and execute them with her own hands. She stared at the child fixedly.

"You buy him some socks out of your allowance," she said at last. Then she added an anxious and inadequate "Oh, dear!"

"Aren't you happy?" Sheila asked in unconscious imitation of Dick, with whom she had been spending most of her time for days, while Nancy superintended the additions and improvements she was making in the up-stairs quarters of her Inn, preparatory to moving in for the winter.

"Yes, I'm happy," Nancy said, "but I'm sort of—stirred, too. I wish you were my own little girl, Sheila. I think I'll take you with me to the Inn to-day. You might melt and trickle away if I left you alone here with Hitty."

"Quelle joie! I mean, how nice that will be! Then I can talk about Paris to Gaspard, and he will give me some baba, with a soupcon of maraschine in the sauce, if you will tell him that I may, Miss Dear."

"I'll think about it." It was Nancy's dearest privilege to be asked and grant permission for such indulgences. "Put on that floppy white hat with the yellow ribbon, and take your white coat."

"When I had only one dress to wear I suppose I got just as dirty," Sheila reflected, "only it didn't show on black satin. Now I can tell just how dirty I am by looking. I make lots of washing, Miss Dear."

"Yes, thank heaven," Nancy said, unaccountably tearful of a sudden.

The first part of the day at the Inn went much like other days. Gaspard, eager to retrieve the record of the week when Hitty and a Viennese pastry cook had divided the honors of preparing the daily menus between them—for Nancy had never again attempted the feat—never let a day go by without making a new plat de jour or inventing a sauce; was in the throes of composing a new casserole, and it was a pleasure to watch him deftly sifting and sorting his ingredients, his artist's eyes aglow with the inward fire of inspiration. Nancy called all the waitresses together and offered them certain prizes and rewards for all the buttermilk, and prunes and other health dishes that they were able to distribute among ailing patrons,—with the result they were over assiduous at the luncheon hour, and a red-headed young man with gold teeth made a disturbance that it took both Hilda and Michael, who appeared suddenly in his overalls from the upper regions where he was constructing window-boxes, to quell. But these incidents were not sufficiently significant to make the day in any way a memorable one to Nancy. It took a telephone message from Collier Pratt, requesting, nay demanding, her presence in his studio for the first sitting on her portrait, to make the day stand out upon her calendar.

"Sheila is with me. Shall I bring her?" Nancy asked.

"No," Collier Pratt said uncompromisingly, "I am not a parent at this hour. She would disturb me."

"What shall I wear?"

"What have you got on?"

"That blue crepe, made surplice,—the one you liked the other night."

"That's just what I want—Madonna blue. Can you get down here in fifteen minutes?"

"Yes, I'll send Michael up-town with Sheila."

The bare, ramshackle studio on Washington Square shocked her,—it was so comfortless, so dingy; but the canvases on the walls, set up against the wainscoting, stacked on every available chair, gave her a new and almost appalling impression of his personality, and the peculiar poignant power of him. She could not appraise them, or get any real sense of their quality apart from the astounding revelation of the man behind the work.

"They're wonderful!" she gasped, but "You're wonderful" were the words she stifled on her lips.

He painted till the light failed him.

"It's this diffused glow,—this gentle, faded afternoon light that I want," he said. "I want you to emerge from your background as if you had bloomed out of it that very moment. Oh! I've got you at your hour, you know! The prescient maternal—that's what I want. The conscious moment when a woman becomes aware that she is potentially a mother. Sheila's done that for you. She's brought it out in you. It was ready, it was waiting there before, but now it's come. It's wonderful!"

"Yes," Nancy said, "it's—it's come."

"It hasn't been done, you know. It's a modern conception, of course; but they all do the thing realized, or incipient. I want to do it implicit—that's what I want. I might have searched the whole world over and not found it."

"Well, here I am," said Nancy faintly.

"Yes, here you are," Collier Pratt responded out of the fervor of his artist's absorption.

"It's rather a personal matter to me," Nancy ventured some seconds later.

Collier Pratt turned from the canvas he was contemplating, and looked at her, still posed as he had placed her, upright, yet relaxed in the scooped chair that held her without constraining her.

"Like a flower in a vase," he said; "to me you're a wonderful creature."

"I'm glad you like me," Nancy said, quivering a little. "This is a rather uncommon experience to me, you know, being looked at so impersonally. Now please don't say that I'm being American."

"But, good God! I don't look at you impersonally."

"Don't you?" Nancy meant her voice to be light, and she was appalled to hear the quaver in it.

"You know I don't." He glanced toward a dun-colored curtain evidently concealing shelves and dishes. "Let's have some tea."

"I can't stay for tea." Nancy felt her lips begin to quiver childishly, but she could not control their trembling. "Oh! I had better go," she said.

Collier Pratt took one step toward her. Then he turned toward the canvas. Nancy read his mind like a flash.

"You're afraid you'll disturb the—what you want to paint," she said accusingly.

"I am." He smiled his sweet slow smile, then he took her stiff interlaced hands and raised them, still locked together, to his lips where he kissed them gently, one after the other. "Will you forgive me?" he asked, and pushed her gently outside of his studio door.



CHAPTER XI

BILLY AND CAROLINE

It was one night in middle October when Billy and Caroline met by accident on Thirty-fourth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Caroline stood looking into a drug-store window where an automatic mannikin was shaving himself with a patent safety razor.

"There's a wax feller going to bed in an automatic folding settee, a little farther down the street," Billy offered gravely at her elbow; "and on Forty-second Street there is a real live duck pond advertising the advantages of electric heaters in the home."

"H'lo," said Caroline, who was colloquial only in moments of real pleasure or excitement. "I've just written to you. I asked you to come and see me to-morrow evening," she added more seriously, "to talk about something that's weighing on my mind."

"I'm going out with a blonde to-morrow, night," Billy said speciously, "but what's the matter with to-night? I'm free until six-fifty A. M. and I could spare an hour or two between then and breakfast time."

"I can't to-night," Caroline said, "I promised Nancy to dine at the Inn."

"That wasn't your line at all," Billy groaned. "Who's the blonde?—that was your cue. If it's only Nancy you're dining with—that can be fixed."

"I regard an engagement with Nancy as just as sacred as—"

"So do I," Billy cut in. "She is the blonde. Well, let to-morrow night be as it may; let's you and I call up the Nancy girl now and tell her that we're going batting together; she won't care."

"I don't like doing that," Caroline said; "it's a nice night for a bat, though."

"I walked down Murray Hill and saw the sun set in a nice pinky gold setting," Billy said artfully. Caroline liked to have him get an artistic perspective on New York. "Let's walk down the avenue to the Cafe des Artistes and have Emince Bernard, and a long wide high, tall drink of—ginger ale," he finished lamely.

"We'd have to telephone Nancy," Caroline hesitated.

Billy took her by the arm and guided her into the interior of the drug-store to the side aisle where the telephones were, and stepped into the first empty booth that offered. Caroline stopped him firmly as he was about to shut himself inside.

"I'd rather hear what you say," she said.

Billy slipped his nickel in the slot and took up the receiver.

"Madison Square 3403 doesn't answer," Central informed him crisply after an interval.

"Oh! Nancy, dear," Billy replied softly into her astonished ear. "Caroline and I are going off by ourselves to-night, you don't care, do you?"

"Ringing thr-r-ree-four-o-thr-r-ee, Madison Square."

"That's nice of you," Billy responded heartily. "I thought you'd say that."

"Madison Square thr-r-ree-four-o-t-h-r-r-ree doesn't answer. Hang up your receiver and I'll call you if I get the party."

"Of course I will. You're always so tactful in the way you put things, always so generous and kind and thoughtful. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it."

"What did Nancy say?" Caroline asked, as they turned away from the booth.

"You heard my end of the conversation," Billy said blandly. "You can deduce hers from it."

"There was something about your end of the conversation that sounded queer to me somehow. It was odd that Central should have returned your nickel to you after you had talked so long."

"Yes, wasn't it?" Billy asked innocently. "Well, I suppose mistakes will happen in the best regulated telephone companies."

"I like you," Billy said contentedly, as the lights of the avenue strung themselves out before them. "I like walking down this royal thoroughfare with you. You're a kind of a neutral girl, but I like you."

"You're a kind of ridiculous boy."

"Don't you like me a little bit?"

"Yes, a little."

"What did you get engaged to me for if you only like me a little?"

"Ought not to be engaged to you. That's one of the things I want to talk to you about."

"Well, you are engaged to me, and that's one of the things I don't care to discuss—even with you."

"Oh! Billy," Caroline sighed, "why can't we be just good friends and see a good deal of each other without this perpetual argument about getting married?"

"I don't know why we can't, but we can't," Billy said firmly. "What was the other thing you wanted to talk to me about?"

"Nancy's affairs. The reckless—the criminal way she is running that restaurant, and the unthinkable expenditure of money involved. I can't sleep at night thinking of it."

"And I thought this was going to be a pleasant evening," Billy cried to the stars.

"I wish you'd be serious about this," Caroline said. "Nancy's the best friend I have in the world, and she doesn't seem to be quite right in her mind, Billy. Of course, I approve of a good part of her scheme. I believe that she can be of incalculable value as a pioneer in an enterprise of this sort. Her restaurant is based on a strictly scientific theory, and every person who patronizes it gets a balanced ration, if he has the good sense to eat it as it's served."

"And not leave any protein on his plate," Billy murmured.

"I don't even mind the slight extra expenditure and the deficit that is bound to follow her theory of stuffing all her subnormal patrons with additional nourishment. That is charity. I believe in devoting a certain amount of one's income to charity, but what I mind about the whole proceeding is the crazy way that Nancy is running it. She's not even trying to break even. She orders all the delicacies of the season—no matter what they are. She's paid an incredible amount for the new set of carved chairs she has bought for up-stairs. You'd think she had an unlimited fortune behind her, instead of being in a position where the sheriff may walk in upon her any day."

"Handy men to have around the house,—sheriffs. I knew a deputy sheriff once that helped the lady of the house do a baby wash while he was standing around in charge of the place. All the servants had deserted, and—"

"You pretend to be Nancy's friend, and you're the only thing remotely approaching a lawyer that she has, and yet you can shake with joy at the thought of her going into bankruptcy."

"That isn't what I'm shaking with joy about."

"Nancy must have spent at least twice the amount of her original investment."

"Just about," Billy agreed cheerfully.

Caroline turned large reproachful eyes on him.

"Billy, how can you?"

"Listen to me, Caroline, honey love, it will be all right. Nancy isn't so crazy as she seems. She is running wild a little, I admit, but there's no danger of the sheriff or any other disaster. She knows what she's doing, and she's playing safe, though I admit it's an extraordinary game."

"She's unhappy," Caroline said. "You don't suppose she's going to marry Dick to get out of the scrape, and that she's suffering because she's had to make that compromise."

"No, I don't," said Billy.

"I can't imagine anything more dreadful than to give up your career—your independence because you were beaten before you could demonstrate it."

"Let's go right in here," Billy said, guiding her by the arm through the door of the grill of the Cafe des Artistes which she was ignoring in her absorption.

It was early but the place was already crowded with the assortment of upper cut Bohemians, Frenchmen, and other discriminating diners to whom the cafe owed its vogue. Billy and Caroline found a snowy table by the window, a table so small that it scarcely seemed to separate them.

"If it's Dick that Nancy's depending on," Caroline shook out her mammoth napkin vigorously, "then I think the whole situation is dreadful."

"I don't see why," Billy argued; "have him to fall back on—that's what men are for."

"Your opinion of women, Billy Boynton, just about tallies with the most conservative estimate of the Middle Ages."

"Charmed, I'm sure," he grinned, then his evil genius prompting, he continued. "Isn't that just about what you have me for—to fall back on? You're fond of me. You know I'll be there if the bottom drops out. You're sure of me, and you're holding me in reserve against the time when you feel like concentrating your attention on me."

"Is that what you think?"

"Sure, it's the way it is. If I haven't got any kick coming I don't see why you should have any. You're worth it to me. That's the point."

Caroline opened her lips to speak, and then thought better of it. The dangerous glint in her pellucid hazel eyes was lost on Billy. He was watching the clear cool curve of her cheek, the smooth brown hair brushed up from the temple, and tucked away under the smart folds of a premature velvet turban.

"I like those mouse-colored clothes of yours," he said contentedly.

"I think the only reason a woman should marry a man is that she—she—"

"Likes him?" Billy suggested.

"No, that she can be of more use in the world married than single. She can't be that unless she's going to marry a man who is entirely in sympathy with her point of view."

"That I know to be unsound," Billy said. "Caroline, my love, this is a bat. Can't we let these matters of the mind rest for a little? See, I've ordered Petite Marmite, and afterward an artichoke, and all the nice fattening things that Nancy won't let me eat."

"I wish you'd tell me about Nancy," Caroline said. "It makes a lot of difference. You haven't any idea how much difference it makes."

"See the nice little brown pots with the soup in them," Billy implored her. "Cheese, too, all grated up so fine and white. Sprinkle it in like little snow-flakes."

But in spite of all Billy's efforts the evening went wrong after that. Caroline was wrapped in a mantle of sorrowful meditation the opacity of which she was not willing to let Billy penetrate for a moment. After they had dined they took a taxi-cab up-town and danced for an hour on the smooth floor of one of the quieter hotels. Billy's dancing being of that light, sure, rhythmic quality that should have installed him irrevocably in the regard of any girl who had ever danced with a man who performed less admirably. Caroline liked to dance and fell in step with an unexpected docility, but even in his arms, dipping, pivoting, swaying to the curious syncopation of modern dance time, she was as remote and cool as a snow maiden.