At the table on the edge of the dancing platform where they sat between dances, Billy pledged her in nineteen-four Chablis Mouton.

"This is what you look like," he said, holding up his glass to the light, "or perhaps I ought to say what you act like,—clear, cold stuff,—lovely, but not very sweet."

"If it's Dick,"—Caroline refused to be diverted—"Nancy is merely taking the easiest way out. Just getting married because she hasn't the courage to go through any other way. She and Dick have hardly a taste in common—they don't even read the same books."

"What difference does that make?"

"If you don't know I can't tell you. When you see somebody else in danger of following the same course of action that you, yourself, are pursuing," she added cryptically, "it puts a new face on your own affairs."

"Oh! let's get out of here," Billy said, signaling for his check.

Caroline lived, for the summer while her family were away, in an elaborate Madison Avenue boarding-house. The one big room into which the entrance gave, dim and palatial in effect—at least in the light of the single gas-jet turned economically low—seemed scarcely to present a departure from its prototype, the great living hall of the private residence for which the house was originally designed. It was only on the second floor that the character of the establishment became unmistakable. Billy took Caroline's latchkey from her,—she usually opened the door for herself—and let her quietly into the dim interior. Then he stepped inside himself, and closed the door gently after him. Being a man he entirely failed to note the drift of psychological straws that indicated the sudden sharp turn of the wind, and the presage of storm in the air. He was thinking only of the illusive, desirable, maddening quality of the girl that walked beside him, filled with inexplicable forebodings for a friend, whom he knew to be invulnerable to misfortune. Certain phrases of Dick's were ringing in his ears to the exclusion of all more immediate conversational fragments.

"Cave-man stuff—that's the answer to you and Caroline.... This watchful waiting's entirely the wrong idea...."

Billy made a great lunge toward the figure of his fiancee, and caught her in his arms.

"I've never really kissed you before," he cried, "now I shan't let you go."

She struggled in his arms, but he mastered her. He covered her cool brow with kisses, her hands, the lovely curve of her neck where the smooth hair turned upward, and at last—her lips.

"You're mine, my girl," he exulted, "and nothing, nothing, nothing shall ever take you away from me now."

There was a click in the latch of the door through which they had just entered. Another belated boarder was making his way into the domicile which he had chosen as a substitute for the sacred privacy of home. Caroline tore herself out of Billy's arms just in time to exchange greetings with the incoming guest with some pretense of composure. He was a fat man with an umbrella which clattered against the balusters as he ascended the carved staircase.

"Caught with the goods," Billy tried to say through lips stiffened in an effort at control.

Caroline turned on him, her face blazing with anger, the transfiguring white rage of the woman whose spiritual fastnesses have been invaded through the approach of the flesh.

"There is no way of my ever forgiving you," she said. "No way of my ever tolerating you, or anything you stand for again. You are utterly—utterly—utterly detestable in my eyes."

"Is—is that so?" Billy stammered, dizzied by the suddenness of the onslaught.

"I—I've got some decent hold on my pride and self-respect—even if Nancy hasn't, and I'm not going to be subjugated like a cave woman by mere brute force either."

"Aren't you?" said Billy weakly, his mind in a whirl still from the lightning-like overthrow of all his theories of action.

"I'm not going to do what Nancy is going to do, just out of sheer temperamental weakness, and—and tendency to follow the line of least resistance."

Billy had no idea of the significance of her last phrase, and let it go unheeded. Caroline turned and walked away from him, her head high.

"But, good lord, Nancy isn't going to do it," he called after her retreating figure, but all the answer he got was the silken swish of her petticoat as she took the stairs.



CHAPTER XII

MORE CAVE-MAN STUFF

When Nancy left Collier Pratt's studio on the day of her first sitting for the portrait he was to do of her, she never expected to enter it again. She was in a panic of hurt pride and anger at his handling of the situation that had developed there, and in a passion of self-disgust that she had been responsible for it.

It was a simple fact of her experience that the men she knew valued her favors, and exerted themselves to win them. She had always had plenty of suitors, or at least admirers who lacked only a few smiles of encouragement to make suitors of them, and she was accustomed to the consideration of the desirable woman, whose privilege it is to guide the conversation into personal channels, or gently deflect it therefrom. An encounter in which she could not find her poise was as new as it was bewildering to her.

From the moment that she had begun to realize Collier Pratt's admiration for her she had scarcely given a thought to any other man. With the insight of the artist he had seen straight into the heart of Nancy's secret—the secret that she scarcely knew herself until he translated it for her, the most obvious secret that a prescient universe ever throbbed with,—that a woman is not fulfilled until she is a mate and a mother. The nebulous urge of her spirit had been formulated. In Nancy's world there was no abstract sentimentality—if this man indulged himself in emotional regret for her frustrated womanhood—she called it that to herself—it must in some way concern him. She had never in her life been troubled by a condition that she was not eager to ameliorate, and she could not conceive of an emotional interest in an individual disassociated from a certain responsibility for that individual's welfare. She took Collier Pratt's growing tenderness for her for granted, and dreamed exultant dreams of their romantic association.

The scene in the studio had shocked her only because he put his art first. He had taken a lover's step toward her, and then glancing at the crudely splotched canvas from which his ideal of her was presently to emerge, he had thought better of it, soothing her with caresses as if she were a child, and like a child dismissing her. She felt that she never wanted to see again the man who could so confuse and humiliate her. But this mood did not last. As the days went on, and she feverishly recapitulated the circumstances of the episode, she began to feel that it was she who had failed to respond to the beautiful opportunity of that hour. She had inspired the soul of an artist with a great concept of womanhood, and had, in effect, demanded an immediate personal tribute from him. He had been wise to deflect the emotion that had sprung up within them both. After the picture was done—. She became eager to show him that she understood and wanted to help him conserve the impression of her from which his inspiration had come, and when he asked her to go to the studio again the following week she rejoiced that she had another chance to prove to him how simply she could behave in the matter.

She looked in the mirror gravely every night after she had done her hair in the prescribed pig-tails to try to determine whether or not the look he had discovered in her face was still there,—the look of implicit maternity that she had been fortunate enough to reflect and symbolize for him,—but she was unable to come to any decision about it. Her face looked to her much as it had always looked—except that her brow and temples seemed to have become more transparent and the blue veins there seemed to be outlined with an even bluer brush than usual.

She was busier than she had ever been in her life. The volume of her business was swelling. With the return of the native to the city of his adoption—there is no native New Yorker in the strict sense of the word—Outside Inn was besieged by clamorous patrons. Gaspard, with the adaptability of his race, had evolved what was practically a perfect system of presenting the balanced ration to an unconscious populace, and the populace was responding warmly to his treatment. It had taken him a little time to gauge the situation exactly, to adapt the supply to the idiosyncrasies of the composite demand, but once he had mastered his problem he dealt with it inspiredly. His southern inheritance made it possible for him to apprehend if he could not actually comprehend the taste of a people who did not want the flavor of nutmeg in their cauliflower, and who preferred cocoanut in their custard pie, and he realized that their education required all the diplomacy and skill at his command.

Nancy found him unexpectedly intelligent about the use of her tables. He grasped the essential fact that the values of food changed in the process of cooking, and that it was necessary to Nancy's peace of mind to calculate the amount of water absorbed in preparing certain vegetables, and that the amount of butter and cream introduced in their preparation was an important factor in her analysis. He also nodded his head with evident appreciation when she discoursed to him of the optimum amount of protein as opposed to the actual requirements in calories of the average man, but she never quite knew whether the matter interested him, or his native politeness constrained him to listen to her smilingly as long as she might choose to claim his attention. But the fact remained that there was no such cooking in any restaurant in New York of high or low degree, as that which Gaspard provided, and as time went on, and he realized that expense was not a factor in Nancy's conception of a successfully conducted restaurant, the reputation of Outside Inn increased by leaps and bounds.

To Nancy's friends—with the exception, of course, of Billy, who was in her confidence—the whole business became more and more puzzling. Caroline, her susceptibility to vicarious distress being augmented by the sensitiveness of her own emotional state, yearned and prayed over her alternately. Betty, avid of excitement, spent her days in the pleasurable anticipation of a dramatic bankruptcy. It was on Dick, however, that the actual strain came. He saw Nancy growing paler and more ethereal each day, on her feet from morning till night manipulating the affairs of an enterprise that seemed to be assuming more preposterous proportions every hour of its existence. He made surreptitious estimates of expenditures and suffered accordingly, approximating the economic unsoundness of the Inn by a very close figure, and still Nancy kept him at arm's length and flouted all his suggestions for easing, what seemed to him now, her desperate situation.

He managed to pick her up in his car one day with Sheila, and persuaded her to a couple of hours in the open. She was on her way home from the Inn, and had meant to spend that time resting and dressing before she went back to consult with Gaspard concerning the night meal. She had no complaint to make now of the usurpation of her authority or the lack of actual executive service that was required of her. With the increase in the amount of business that the Inn was carrying she found that every particle of her energy was necessary to get through the work of the day.

"I'm worried about you," Dick said, as they took the long ribbon of road that unfurled in the direction of Yonkers, and Nancy removed her hat to let the breeze cool her distracted brow. His man Williams, was driving.

"Well, don't tell me so," she answered a trifle ungraciously.

"Miss Dear is cross to-day," Sheila explained. "The milk did not come for Gaspard to make the poor people's custard, creme renverse, he makes—deliciously good, and we give it to the clerking girls."

"The buttermilk cultures were bad," Nancy said. "And I wasn't able to get any of the preparations of it, that I can trust. There are one or two people that ought to have it every day and their complexions show it if they don't."

"I suppose so," Dick said, with a grimace.

"These people who have worked in New York all summer have run pretty close to their margin of energy. You've no idea what a difference a few calories make to them, or how closely I have to watch them, and when I have to substitute an article of diet for the thing they've been used to, it's awfully hard to get them to take it."

"I should think it might be," Dick said. "It's true about people who have worked in New York all summer, though. I have—and you have."

"Oh! I'm all right," Nancy said.

"So am I," Sheila said, "and so is Monsieur Dick, n'est-ce pas?"

"Vraiment, Mademoiselle."

"Father isn't very right, though. Even when Miss Dear has all the beautiful things in the most beautiful colors in the world cooked for him and sent to him, he won't eat them unless she comes and sits beside him and begs him."

"He's very fond of sauce verte," Nancy said hastily, "and apricot mousse and cepes et pimentos, things that Gaspard can't make for the regular menu,—bright colored things that Sheila loves to look at."

"He likes petit pois avec laitue too and haricot coupe, and artichaut mousselaine. Sometimes when he does not want them Miss Dear eats them."

"I'm glad they are diverted to some good use," Dick said.

"I've been looking into the living conditions of my waitresses." Nancy changed the subject hastily. "Did you realize, Dick, that the waitresses have about the unfairest deal of any of the day laborers? They're not organized, you know. Their hours are interminable, the work intolerably hard, and the compensation entirely inadequate. Moreover, they don't last out for any length of time. I'm trying out a new scheme of very short shifts. Also, I'm having a certain sum of money paid over to them every month from my bank. If they don't know where it comes from it can't do them any harm. That is, I am not establishing a precedent for wages that they won't be able to earn elsewhere. I consider it immoral to do that."

"You are paying them an additional sum of money out of your own pocket? You told me you paid them the maximum wage, anyhow, and they get lots of tips."

"Oh! but that's not nearly enough."

"Nancy," Dick said dramatically, "where do you get the money?"

"Oh, I don't know," Nancy said, "it comes along. The restaurant makes some."

"Very little."

"I could make it pay any time that I wanted to."

"Sometimes I wonder if you are in full possession of your senses."

"Caroline is affected that way, too. I feel that she is likely to get an alienist in at any time. She is so earnest in anything she undertakes. She and Billy have had a scrap, did you know it?"

"I didn't."

"Billy wants to marry her, and he has shocked her delicate feelings by suggesting it to her."

"I imagine you have a good deal to do with her feelings on the subject," Dick said gloomily. "I suppose at heart you don't believe in marriage, or think you don't and you've communicated the poison to Caroline."

"I've done nothing of the kind," Nancy insisted warmly. "I do believe in marriage with all my heart. I think the greatest service any woman can render her kind in this mix-up age is to marry one man and make that marriage work by taking proper scientific care of him and his children."

"This is news to me," Dick said. "I thought that you thought that the greatest service a woman could do was to run Outside Inn, and stuff all the derelicts with calories."

"That's a service, too."

"Sure."

They were out beyond the stately decay of the up-town drive, with its crumbling mansions and the disheveled lawns surrounding them, beyond the view of the most picturesque river in the world, though, comparatively speaking, the least regarded, covering the prosaic stretch of dusty road between Van Courtland Park and the town of Yonkers.

"I like the Bois better," Sheila said, "but I like Central Park better than the Champs Elysees. In Paris the children are not so gay as the grown-up people. Here it is the grown-up people who are without smiles on the streets."

"Why is that, Dick?" Nancy asked.

"That's always true of the maturer races, the gaiety of the French is appreciative enthusiasm,—if I may invent a phrase. The children haven't developed it."

"I would like to have my hand held, Monsieur Dick," Sheila announced. "I always feel homesick when I think about Paris. I was so contente and so malheureuse there."

"Why were you unhappy, sweetest?" Nancy asked.

"My father says I am never to speak of those things, and so I don't—even to Miss Dear, my bien aimee."

Dick lifted Sheila into his lap, he took the hand that still clung to Nancy's in his warm palm, and held them both there caressingly.

"My bien aimee," he said softly.

Beyond the town a more gracious and magnificent country revealed itself; lovely homes set high on sweeping terraces, private parks and gardens and luxuriant estates, all in a blaze of October radiance with the glorious pigments of the season.

"Isn't it time to go back?" Nancy asked.

"Not yet," Dick said. "I want to show you something. There's an old place here I want you to see. That colonial house set way back in the trees there."

"Williams is driving in," Nancy said as they approached it.

"He's been here before."

"Are we going to get out?" Sheila asked.

Dick was already opening the door of the tonneau and assisting Nancy out of the car.

"I'm going to leave Sheila with Williams, and take you over the house, Nancy. She'll be more interested in the grounds than she would in the interior. I want you to see the inside."

He took a key out of his pocket, and unlocked the stately door. Everything about the place was gigantic, stately,—the huge columns that supported the roof of the porch, the big elms that flanked it, and the great entrance hall, as they stepped into its majestic enclosure.

"It's a biggish sort of place, isn't it?" Nancy said.

"But it's rather lovely, don't you think so?" Dick asked anxiously. "These old places are getting increasingly hard to find,—real old homes, dignified and beautiful, within a reasonable distance from town."

"It is lovely," Nancy said, "it could be made perfectly wonderful to live in. I can see this big hall—furnished in mahogany or even carved oak that was old enough. Thank heaven, we're no longer slaves to a period in our decorating; we can use anything that's beautiful and suitable and not intrinsically incongruous with a clear conscience."

"Come up-stairs."

Nancy lingered on the landing of the fine old staircase, white banistered with a mahogany hand-rail, that turned only once before it led into the region up-stairs.

"I'd rather see the kitchen," she said.

"The kitchen isn't the thing that I'm proudest of. Its plumbing is early English, or Scottish, I'm afraid. I think this arrangement up here is delightful. See these front suites, one on either side of the hall. Bedroom, dressing-room, sitting-room. Which do you like best? I thought perhaps I might take the one that overlooks the orchard."

Nancy stopped still on her way from window to window.

"Dick Thorndyke, whose house is this?" she demanded.

"Mine."

"Yours—have you bought it?"

"Yes, I put the deed in my safe deposit vault yesterday. Come in here. Isn't this a cunning little guest chamber nested in the trees? Be becoming to Betty's style of beauty, wouldn't it?" He held the door open for her ingratiatingly, and she passed under his arm perfunctorily.

"What on earth did you buy a house like this for?"

"I thought you might like it."

"I—what have I to do with it?"

Dick turned the rusty key in the lock deliberately, and put it in his pocket, thus closing them into the little musty room which had no other exit. A branch of flaming maple leaves tapped lightly on the window.

"You've a whole lot to do with it, Nancy," he said. "It's yours, and I'm yours, and I want to know how much longer you're going to hedge."

"I'm not hedging," Nancy blazed. "Take that key out of your pocket. This is moving-picture stuff."

"I know it is. I can't get you to talk to me any other way, so I thought I'd try main force for a change."

"Well, it is a change," she agreed. "Shall I begin to scream now, or do you intend to give me some other provocation?"

"Don't be coarse, darling." There is a certain disadvantage in having known the woman who is the object of your tenderest emotions all your life, and to be on terms of the most familiar badinage with her. Dick was feeling this disadvantage acutely at the moment. He took a step toward her, and put a heavy hand on her shoulder. "Nancy, don't you love me?" he said, "don't you really?"

"No," Nancy said deliberately, "I don't, and you know very well I don't. Unlock that door, and let's be sensible."

"Don't you know, dear, or care that you're hurting me?"

"No, I don't," Nancy said. "You say so, and I hear you, but I don't really believe it. If I did—"

"If you did—what?"

"Then I'd be sorrier."

"You aren't sorry at all, as it stands."

"I find it's awfully hard to be sorry for you, Dick, in any connection. There's really nothing pathetic about you, no matter how tragic you think you are being. You're rich and lucky and healthy. You have everything you want—"

"Not everything."

"And you live the way you want to, and eat the food you want to—"

"The ruling passion."

"And make the jokes you want to." Nancy literally stuck up a saucy nose at him. "There is really nothing that I could contribute to your happiness. I mean nothing important. You are not a poor man whom I could help to work his way up to the top, or a genius that needs fostering, or a—"

"Dyspeptic that needs putting on a special diet,—but for all that I do need a mother's love, Nancy."

"I don't believe you do," Nancy said, a trifle absently. "Unlock the door, Dick. I don't think Sheila put on that sweater when I told her to, and I'm afraid she'll get cold."

"Kiss me, Nancy."

"Will you unlock the door if I do?"

"Yes'um."

Nancy put up cool fragrant lips to meet a brother's kiss, and for the moment was threatened with a second salute that was very much less fraternal, but the danger passed. Dick unlocked the door and let her pass him without protest.

"If you had been any other girl," he mused, as they went down the stairs together companionably, "you wouldn't have got away with that."

"With what?" Nancy asked innocently.

"If you don't know," Dick said, "I won't tell you. If you'd been any other girl I should have thrown that key out of the window when you began to sass me."

"And then?" Nancy inquired politely.

"And then," Dick replied finally and firmly.

"Are there any other girls?" Nancy asked, faintly curious, as they stood on the deep steps of the porch waiting for Sheila and Williams who were emerging from the middle entrance.

Dick met her glance a little solemnly, and hesitated for a perceptible instant.

"Are there, Dick?" she insisted.

"Yes, dear," he said.



CHAPTER XIII

THE HAPPIEST DAY

It was thoroughly characteristic of Nancy to turn her back on the most significant facts of her experience, and occupy herself exclusively with its by-products. She refused to consider herself as an heiress entitled to spend money lavishly for her own uses, but she squandered it on her pet enterprise. She dismissed the idea that Dick, whom she neglected to discourage as decisively as her growing interest in another man would seem to warrant, had bought a country estate for the sole purpose of ensconcing her there as mistress. She dreamed of Collier Pratt and his ideal of her, and presented herself punctually at his studio as a model for that ideal, while ignoring absolutely the fact that he was nearly a hundred dollars in debt to her for meals served at Outside Inn. She had sufficient logic and common sense to apply to these matters, and sufficient imagination to handle them sympathetically, had she chosen to consider them at all, but she did not choose. She was deep in the adventure of her existence as differentiated from its practical working out.

The day Collier Pratt finished his portrait of her she was not alone in the studio with him. Sheila, in a fluffy white dress with a floppy black satin hat framing her poignant little face, was omnipresent at the interview which succeeded the actual two hours of absorption when he put in the last telling strokes.

"It's done," he said, as he set aside pigments and brushes, and divested himself of his painting apron. "I don't want to look at it now. I've got it, but I can't stand the strain of contemplating it till my brain cools a trifle. Let's go out and celebrate."

"Where shall we go?" Nancy said. This was the moment she had dreamed of for weeks, the hour of fruition when the work was done, and they could face each other, man and woman again with no strip of canvas between them.

"The place I always go when I've finished a picture is a little cafe under the shadow of Notre Dame, where I get cakes and beer and an excellent perspective on all my favorite gargoyles."

"And the little birds flutter in the sun, and eat my crumbs and the great music swells out while you ask the garcon for another bock. Do you remember, father dear, the day that she found us there?"

"I remember only that you made yourself ill eating Madelaines and had to be taken home en voiture," Collier Pratt said quickly. "We will go and have some coffee at the Cafe des Artistes, and discuss ships and shoes and sealing wax—anything but the art of painting."

"And cabbages and kings," Sheila contributed ecstatically. "I used to think when I was a very little girl and couldn't read English very well that it was really Heaven where Alice went, and it made me sad to think she was dead and I didn't understand it, but now Miss Dear has explained to me."

"Miss Dear has made a good many things clear to us both," Collier Pratt said, but he said no more that might be even remotely construed as referring to the issue between them, and Nancy finished out her day with dragging limbs and an aching empty heart that a word of tenderness would have filled to running over.

But after her work for the day was done, and she was back in her own apartment with Sheila tucked snugly in bed, and Hitty out for the night with a sick friend, there came the touch on her bell that she knew was Collier Pratt's; and she opened the door to find him standing on her threshold.

"I knew you'd come," she said, as women always say to the man they have that hour given up looking for.

"I wasn't sure I would," Collier Pratt said, "but I did, you see."

"Why weren't you sure?" She stood beside him in her little rectangular hall while he divested himself of his cape, and placed his hat, stick and gloves in orderly sequence on the oak settee beside it. She liked to watch the precision with which he always arranged these things.

"Why should I be sure?" He turned and faced her. "Miss Dear," he said to himself softly, "Miss Dear," and she saw that in his eyes which made the moment simpler for her to bear.

She led the way into her drawing-room.

"Light the candles," he said, "this firelight is too good to drown in a flood of electric light!"

"Is that better?" she asked.

They were standing before the fireplace; the embers had burned to a gentle glowing radiance. Of the four candles she had lighted, the wick of only one had taken fire and was burning. Nancy's breath caught in her throat, and she could not steady it. Collier Pratt took a step forward and held out his arms.

"No, this is better," he said.

"I thought there was some place in the world where I could be—comfortable," Nancy said, when she finally lifted her head from the shoulder of the shabby, immaculate black suit, "but I wasn't quite sure."

"Are you sure now, you little wonder woman?" He held her at the length of his arm for a moment and gazed curiously into her face. Then he drew her slowly toward him again. She met his kiss bravely, so bravely that he understood the quality of her courage.

"I didn't realize that this would be the first time," he said.

"There couldn't have been any other time," Nancy breathed, "you know that."

"I didn't know," Collier Pratt said thoughtfully. "Oh! you little American girls, with your strange, straight-laced little bodies and your fearless souls!"

"Betty told you something," Nancy cried, scarcely hearing him, "but it wasn't true. There never has been anybody else." She put her head down on his shoulder again. "It is comfortable here," she said, "where I belong."

She felt the sudden passion sweep through him,—the high avid wave of tenderness and desire,—and she exulted as all purely innocent women exult when that madness surges first through the veins of the man they love. He put his hands on her shoulders and pressed her into the armchair by the fire, and there she took his head on her breast and understood for all time what it means for a woman to be called the mother of men.

"You wonder woman," he murmured again.

She brushed the dark hair back from his forehead and kissed his eyes. "You dear," she said, "you boy, you little boy."

Suddenly through the darkness came the sound of a shrill cry, and the thud of a fall in some room down the corridor.

"It's Sheila," Nancy said, "she has those little nightmares and falls out of bed."

"I know she does," Collier Pratt said, "but she picks herself up again."

"Not always," Nancy said; "don't you want to come in and help me put her back?"

"I do not," Collier Pratt said with unnecessary emphasis.

Nancy was of two minds about picking the child up in her little white night-gown and bringing her out to her father, flushed and lovely with sleep as she was. It was Collier Pratt's baby she had in her arms; her charge, the child she loved, and the child of the man she loved, a part of the miracle that was slowly revealing itself to her; but a sudden sharp instinct warned her that her impulse was ill-timed.

"I had forgotten the child was here," Collier Pratt said when she returned to him.

"I hadn't," Nancy said happily.

"I suppose she has to be somewhere, poor little wretch," he said. "She's an extraordinarily picturesque baby, isn't she?"

Nancy crept nearer to him. He stood leaning against the mantel and frowning slightly, but he made no move toward her again.

"She doesn't have nightmares often now," Nancy said with stiffening lips. "She used to have them almost every night, but by watching her diet carefully we have practically eliminated them."

"The Hitty person doesn't like me," Collier Pratt said. "Pas du tout. She treats me as if I were a book agent."

"She loves Sheila, she—she'd do anything for her."

"The women who do not find me attractive are likely to find me quite conspicuously otherwise, I am afraid." He had been carefully avoiding Nancy's eyes, but her little cry at this drew his gaze. She was standing before him, slowly blanching as if he had struck her, absolutely still except for the trembling of her lips.

"What am I," he said, "to hold out against all the forces of the Universe? Do you love me, Nancy, do you love me?"

"You know," she whispered, once more in the shelter of the shabby shoulder.

"This is madness," he swore as he kissed her; "we're both out of our senses, Nancy; don't you know it?"

"The picture is done, anyhow," she said. "I don't know how I can ever bear to look it in the face, but I shall have to."

"It's the best work I've ever done," he said.

"I don't look like it now, do I?"

He held her off to see.

"No, by jove, you don't. It's gone, now—just that thing I painted."

"How do I look now?"

"Much more commonplace from the point of view from which I painted you. Much more beautiful though,—much more beautiful."

"I'm glad."

"I might paint you again,—like this. No, I swear I won't. I got the thing itself down on canvas. I'll never try to paint you again."

"Is—that flattering?"

"Supremely."

"When am I going to have my picture?" she asked after another interlude. "Do you want me to send for it?"

"I can't give you the picture," he said. "I intended to if I had done merely a portrait, but I can't part with this. It has got to make my fame and fortune."

"I thought I was to have it," Nancy said. "I—I—" then she felt she was being ungenerous, unworthy, "but I couldn't take it, of course, it's too valuable."

"Please God."

"It would be wonderful, wouldn't it, if my picture did make you famous!"

"I think it will."

"I'm nothing but a grubby little working girl, and you're a great artist,—and you love me."

"You're not a grubby little working girl to me," he said, "you're a glorious creature—a wonder woman. I ought to go down on my knees to you for what you've given me in that picture."

"In the picture?" Nancy said. "I love you. I love you. That wasn't in the picture—I kept it out."

* * * * *

"I won't marry him until he is ready for me," she said to herself at one time during the night. She lay perfectly quiet till morning, her hands folded upon her breast, and her little girl pig-tails pulled down on either side of the coverlet, wide-eyed and tranquil. She could not bear to sleep and forget for a moment the beautiful thing that had happened to her between dawn and dawn. "I'll take care of him and Sheila, and nourish him, and help him to sell my picture. It isn't every woman who would understand his kind of loving, but I understand it."

At eight o'clock Hitty came in to her, and roused her from the light drowse into which she had fallen at last.

"You was crying in your sleep again," she said, "your cheeks is all wet. I heard you the minute I put my key into the latch. You're as bad as Sheila, only I expect she suffers from something laying hard on her stummick. It's always something on your mind that starts you in."

"There's nothing on my mind, Hitty," Nancy said, sitting up in bed, "nothing but happiness, I mean. In some ways, Hitty dear, this is the happiest day that I've ever waked up to."

"Well, then, there's other ways that it isn't," Hitty said, opening the door to stalk out majestically.



CHAPTER XIV

BETTY

"There's a lady waiting to see you, sir," Dick's man servant informed him on his arrival at his apartment one evening when he had been dining at his club, and was putting in a leisurely appearance at his own place after his coffee and cigar.

"A lady?"

"Yes, sir, she has been here since nine. She says it's not important, but she insisted on waiting."

"The deuce she did."

Dick's quarters were not, strictly speaking, of the bachelor variety. That is, he had a suite in one of the older apartment houses in the fifties, a building that domiciled more families and middle-aged married couples than sprightly young single gentlemen. Dick had fallen heir to the establishment of an elderly uncle, who had furnished the place some time in the nineties and when he grew too decrepit to keep his foothold in New York had retired to the country, leaving Dick in possession. Even if Dick had been a conspicuously rakish young gentleman, which he was not, the traditional dignity of his surroundings would have certainly protected him from incongruous indiscretion in their vicinity.

Betty rose composedly from the pompous red velour couch that ran along the wall under a portrait of a gentleman that looked like a Philip of Spain, but was really Dick's maternal great grandfather.

"Why, Betty," Dick said, "this isn't convenable unless you have a chaperon somewhere concealed. We don't do things like this."

"I do," Betty said. "I wanted to see you, so I came. In these emancipated days ladies call upon their men friends if they like. It's archaic to prattle of chaperons."

"Still we were all brought up in the fear of them."

"Mine were brought up in the fear of me. I like this place, Dicky. Why don't you give us more parties in it? You haven't had a crowd here for months."

"Everybody's so busy," Dick said, "we don't seem to get together any more. I'm willing to play host any time that the rest want to come."

"You mean Nancy is so busy with her old Outside Inn."

"You are busy there, too."

"I'm not so busy that I wouldn't come here when I was asked, Dicky."

"Or even when you weren't?" Dick's smile took the edge off his obviously inhospitable suggestion.

"Or even when I wasn't," Betty said impudently. "Won't you sit down, Mr. Thorndyke?"

"Can't I call you a cab, Miss Pope?"

"I don't wish to go away."

"Betty, be reasonable," Dick said, "it's after ten o'clock. It is not usual for me to receive young ladies alone here, and it looks badly. I don't care for myself, of course, but for you it looks badly."

"If it's only for me—I don't care how it looks. Come and sit down beside me, and talk to me, Dicky, and I'll tell you really why I came."

Dick folded his arms and looked down at her. Betty's piquant little face, olive tinted, and pure oval in contour, was turned up to him confidently; under the close seal turban the soft brown hair framed the childish face, while the big dark eyes danced with mischief. She patted the couch by her side invitingly.

"I'll go away in fifteen minutes, Dicky dear. It certainly wouldn't look well if you put me out immediately, after all your establishment knowing that I waited here an hour for you."

Dick took out his watch.

"Fifteen minutes, then," he said. "What's your trouble, Betty?"

"Well, it's a long sad story," she temporized. "Perhaps I had better not begin on it now that our time is so short. You wouldn't like to hold my hand, would you, Dicky?"

"I'm not going to, at any rate."

"I thought you'd say that," she sighed. "Have you seen Nancy lately?"

"Yesterday."

"She's looking better, don't you think so?"

"Yes."

"Preston Eustace is back."

"Is that so? I didn't know he was here yet. I knew he was coming."

"He's to be here six months, or so."

"Have you seen him?"

"No, Caroline told me." Her voice was carefully steadied but Dick noticed for the first time the shadows etched under the big brown eyes, and the flush of excitement splotched high on her cheek-bones. She had been engaged to Preston Eustace for three months succeeding her twentieth birthday.

"On second thoughts I think I will hold your hand, Betty," he said, covering that childlike member with his own rather brawny one. "You are not a very big little girl, are you, Betty?"

"My mother used to tell me that I was a very destructive child."

"I shouldn't wonder if you were that yet."

"Don't let's talk about me. Let's talk about you, Dicky."

"About me?"

"Yes, please. I think you're a very interesting subject."

Having arrived at some conclusion concerning this unprecedented attack upon his privacy, Dick was disposed to be kind to his unexpected visitor. The fact that Preston Eustace was in town and Betty had not seen him shed an entirely new light on her recklessness. Like every other incident in Betty's history her love-affair had been very conspicuously featured.

"The interesting things about me just at present are—" he was just about to say "six shirts of imported gingham" but he bethought himself that she would be certain to demand to see them, so he finished lamely with—"my game of golf, and my new dogs."

"What kind of dogs?"

"Belgian police dogs."

"Where do you keep them?"

"I haven't taken them over yet."

"I heard that you had bought a place up in Westchester, but I asked Nancy, and she said she didn't know. I don't think Nancy appreciates you, Dick."

"That so often happens."

"I mean that seriously."

"It's a serious matter—being appreciated. The only person who I ever thought really appreciated me was Billy's old aunt. Every time she saw me she used to say to me, 'You're such a clean-looking young man I can't take my eyes off you.'"

"You are clean-looking, and awfully good-looking too."

"Do you mind if I smoke, Betty?" Dick carefully disengaged his hand from her clinging fingers, and a look of something like intelligence passed between them, before Betty turned her ingenuous child's stare on him again.

"Not if you'll give me a cigarette, too."

Dick fumbled through his pockets.

"It's awfully stupid, but I haven't any about me," he said, fingering what he knew that she knew to be the well filled case he always carried in his inner pocket. He did not approve of women smoking.

But "Poor Dicky!" was all she said.

"Your fifteen minutes are up, Betty," he said presently, taking out his watch.

"Well, I suppose I'll have to go then."

Dick rose politely.

"You really don't care whether I go or stay, do you?" she sighed.

"I would rather have you go, Betty," he said gravely.

Betty's eyes filled with sudden tears, that Dick to his surprise realized were genuine.

"I wanted you to want me to stay," she said incoherently.

"I suppose you're just a miserable little thing that doesn't want to be alone," he concluded. "Come, I'll take you home."

The telephone bell on the table beside him rang sharply.

"I'm just going out," he said to Billy, on the wire. "Betty is here with a fit of the blues. I'm going to take her home. Ride up with us, will you?"

"He'll meet us down-stairs in ten minutes," he said. "I'll order a taxi."

"I don't want to see Billy," Betty said rebelliously. She rose suddenly, pulling on her gloves, and took a step forward as if about to brush by him petulantly, but as she did so she staggered, put her hand to her eyes, and fell forward against his breast.

Dick picked up the limp little body, and made his way to the couch where he deposited it gently among the stiff red pillows there. Then he began to chafe her hands, to push back the tumbled hair from which the fur hat had been displaced, and finally fallen off, and to call out her name remorsefully.

"Betty, dear, dearest," he cried, "I didn't know, I didn't dream,—I thought you were just trying it on. I'm so sorry, dear, I am so sorry."

She moaned softly, and he bent over her again more closely. Then he gathered her up in his arms.

"Betty, dear, Betty," he said again.

She opened her eyes. Her two soft arms stole up around his neck, and she lifted her lips.

"You little devil," Dick cried, almost at the same instant that he kissed her.

"She deserves to be spanked," he told Billy grimly at the door. "She got in my apartment when I was out, and insisted on staying there till I came in, to make me a visit."

"He doesn't understand me," Betty complained, as she cuddled confidingly in the corner of the taxi-cab, "when I'm serious he doesn't realize or appreciate it, and he doesn't understand the nature of my practical jokes."

"I don't like—practical jokes," Dick said. "Have you seen Preston Eustace, Billy?"

"I haven't seen Caroline," Billy said, as if that disposed of all the interrogatory remarks that might be addressed to him in the present or the future.

"It's a nice-looking river," Betty said, looking out at the softly gleaming surface of the Hudson, as their cab took the drive. "It looks strange to-night, though, laden with all kinds of queer little boats. I wonder how it would feel to be drifting down it, or up it, on a barque or a barkentine—I don't know what a barkentine is—all dead like Elaine or Ophelia,—with your hands neatly folded across your breast?"

"For heaven sake's, Betty," Billy cried, "I don't like your style of conversation. I'm in a state of gloom myself, to-night."

"I didn't say I was in a state of gloom," Betty said. They rode the rest of the way in silence, but when Dick got out of the cab to open her door for her, she whispered to him, "I'm awfully ashamed, Dick," before she fled up-stairs through the darkened hallway of her own home.

"Queer little thing,—Betty," Billy said as Dick stepped back to the cab again, "you never know where you have her. Full of the deuce as she can stick. Unscrupulous little rascal, too, but made of good stuff."

"Don't you think so?" Billy inquired presently as Dick did not answer.

"Think what?"

"That Betty's a queer sort of girl."

Dick took his pipe out of his pocket and began stuffing it full of tobacco. When this was satisfactorily accomplished, he struck a match on his boot heel, and lit the mixture, drawing at it critically meanwhile.

"Damn' queer," he admitted, between puffs.



CHAPTER XV

CLOUDS OF GLORY

Nancy, trailing clouds of glory, took up the management of her Inn with renewed vigor. She had found her touchstone. The flower of love, which she had scarcely understood to be indigenous to the soil of her own practical little garden, had suddenly lifted up its head there in fragrant, radiant bloom. She was so happy that she was impatient of all the inadequate, inefficient manipulation of affairs in the whole world. She felt strong and wise to put everything right in a neglected universe.

She loved. She was satisfied to live in that love for the present, with no imagination of the future except as her lover should construct it for her; and in him she had absolute faith. The things that he had said or left unsaid had no significance to her. Before she had dreamed of a personal relation with him he had singled her out as a creature made for the consummation and fulfilment of the greatest passion of all. The merest suspicion that there had been a man in the world who could have frustrated this beautiful potentiality in her had moved him profoundly. There was nothing in her experience to help her to differentiate between the sensibility of the artistic temperament and the manifestations of the more reliable emotions. The presence in the human breast of a fire that gave out light and not heat was a condition undreamed of in her philosophy. To doubt Collier Pratt's love for her in the face of his tacit pursuit of her, and the acceptance of the obligation she had chosen to put him under, would have seemed to her the rankest kind of heresy.

She had been brought up on terms of comradely equality with boys and men, and she understood the rules of all the pretty games of fluffing and light flirtation that young men and women play with each other, but serious love-making—that was a thing apart. In the world of honor and fair dealing a man took a woman's kiss of surrender for one reason and one reason only——that she was his woman, and he so held her in his heart.

Now that she was in this sort committed to her love for Collier Pratt, her one ambition was to put her life in order for him,—to pick up the raveling threads of her achievement and prove to him and to herself that she was the kind of woman who accomplishes that which she attempts. In the light of his indefatigable patience in all matters that pertained to his art—his clean-cut workmanship—his skill in handling his material—she blushed for the amateur spirit that animated all her undertakings, and for the first time recognized it for what it was.

"Gaspard," she said one morning soon after her miracle had been achieved, "where do you think the greatest leak is? We spend a great deal too much money in running this place. As you know, that is not the most important matter to me. Getting my customers properly nourished with invitingly prepared food is the essential thing, but if there was a way to adjust the economical end of it, I should feel a great deal more comfortable in my mind."

"But certainly, mademoiselle, I should like myself to try the pretty little economies. The Frenchman he likes to spend his money when it is there, but it hurts him in the heart to waste this money without cause."

"Am I wasting money without cause, Gaspard, in your opinion?"

"What else?"

"How can I stop it?"

"By calculation of the tall cost of living, and by buying what is good instead of what is expensive."

"What do you mean, Gaspard?"

Gaspard contemplated her for a moment.

"We have had this week—squab chicken," he said, "racks of little unseasonable lambs, sweetbreads, guinea fowl and filet du boeuf. We have with them mushrooms, fresh string bean, cooked endive, and new, not very good peas grown in glass. We have the salted nuts, the radish, the olive, the celery, the bon bon, all extra without pay. Then you make in addition to this the health foods, and your bills are sky high up. Is it not?"

"I'm afraid it is, Gaspard. I had no idea I was as reckless as all that."

"But yes, and more of it."

"What would you do if you were running this restaurant, Gaspard?"

"I would give ragout, and rabbits—so cheap and so good too—stewed in red wine, and the good pot roast with vegetables all in the delicious sauce, and carrots with parsley and the peas out of the can, cooked with onion and lettuce, and macedoine of all the other things left over. Lentils and flageolet I should buy dried up, and soak them out.—All those things which you have said were needless.—In my way they would be so excellent."

"You make my mouth water, Gaspard. I don't know whether it's a Gallic eloquence, or whether that food really would work. They might like it for a change anyhow."

"I have many personal patrons now," Gaspard said with some pride; "all day they send me messages, and very good tips. I think what I would serve them they would eat.—But there is one thing—" he paused and hesitated dejectedly, "that, what you say, takes the heart out of the beautiful cooking."

"What thing is that, Gaspard?"

"Those calories."

"Why, Gaspard, surely you're used to working with tables now. It must be almost second nature to you. My whole end and aim has been to serve a balanced ration."

"I know, but the ration when he is right, he balances himself. These tables they are like the steps in dancing—to learn and to forget. I figure all day all night to get those calories, and then I find I have eight—and eight are so little—lesser than I would have had without the figuring, and if our customer he has taken himself one piece of sweetmeat outside, he has more than made it up."

"I always have worried about what they eat between meals," Nancy said,—"but that, of course, we can't regulate."

"Could I perhaps go to it, as you say, and cook like the bourgeoisie for a week or two of trials?"

"Yes, I think you could, Gaspard," Nancy said thoughtfully. "Go to it, as we say, and I won't interfere in any way. Maybe they'd like it. Perhaps our food is getting to be too much like hotel food, anyway."

She knew in her heart that the gradually increasing scale of luxury on which she had been running her cuisine had been largely due to her desire to provide Collier Pratt with all the delicacies he loved, without making the fact too conspicuous. The specially prepared dishes sent out to his table had become a matter of so much comment among the members of the staff, and the target of so much piquant satire from Betty that she had become sensitive on the subject, especially since Betty had access to the books, and knew in actual dollars and cents how much this favoritism was costing her. Now that matters had been settled between herself and her lover, she felt vaguely ashamed of this elaboration of method. It was so simple a thing to love a man and give him all you had, with the eyes of the world upon you, if necessary. She felt that she handled the matter rather unworthily.

She had also a consultation with Molly and Dolly about the economic problem, and discovered that they agreed with Gaspard about the unnecessary extravagance of her management.

"Them health foods," Dolly said,—she was not the more grammatical of the twins, "the ones that gets them regular gets so tired of them, or else they gets where they don't need them any more. There's one girl that crumbs up her health muffins and puts them on the window-sill every day when I ain't looking, so's not to hurt my feelings."

"That accounts for all those chittering sparrows," Nancy said.

"And some of those buttermilk men threatens not to come any more if I don't stop serving it to them."

"What do you say to them, Dolly, when they object to it?"

"Well, sometimes I say one thing, and sometimes another. Sometimes I say it's orders to serve it; and sometimes I say will they please to let it stand by their plate not to get me in trouble with the management; and sometimes I coax them to take it."

"By an appeal to their better nature," Nancy said. "I'm glad Dick can't hear all this,—he'd think it was funny."

"We don't have so much trouble with the broths," Molly said, "but so many people would rather have the cream soups Gaspard makes, that we waste a good deal."

"It sours on us," Dolly elucidated.

"What do you think would be the best way out of that?"

"I think to charge for the invalid things," Dolly said; "people would think more of them if they was specials, and had to be paid good money for. Health bread, if you didn't call it that, would go good, if it cost five cents extra."

"What would you call it?" Nancy asked.

"California fruit nut bread, or something like that, and call the custards creme renverse, and the ice-cream, French ice-cream."

"Oh, dear!" Nancy said, "that isn't the way I want to do things at all."

"We can slip the ones that needs them a few things from time to time, can't we, Molly?" Dolly said.

"We'll do it," Nancy said. "I hate the way that the most uninspired ways of doing things turn out to be the best policy after all. I don't believe in stereotyped philanthropy, but I did think I had found a way around this problem of feeding up people who needed it."

"They get fed up pretty good if they do pay a regular price for it," Dolly said. "You can't get something for nothing in this world, and most everybody knows it by now."

"I'm managing my restaurant a little differently," she told Collier Pratt a few days later, as she took her place at the little table beside him, where she habitually ate her dinner. "If you don't like it you are to tell me, and I'll see that you have things you will like."

"This dinner is good," he said reflectively, "like French home cooking. I haven't had a real ragout of lamb since I left the pension of Madame Pellissier. Has your mysterious patroness got tired of furnishing diners de luxe to the populace?"

"Not exactly that," Nancy said, "but she—she wants me to try out another way of doing things."

"I thought that would come. That's the trouble with patronage of any kind. It is so uncertain. There is no immediate danger of your being ousted, is there?"

"No," Nancy said, "there—there is no danger of that."

"I don't like that cutting you down," he said, frowning. "It would be rather a bad outlook for us all if she threw you over, now wouldn't it?"

"Oh!—she won't, there's nothing to worry about, really."

"It would be like my luck to have the only cafe in America turn me out-of-doors.—I should never eat again."

"I promise it won't," Nancy said; "can't you trust me?"

"I never have trusted any woman—but you," he said.

"You can trust me," Nancy said. "The truth is, she couldn't put me out even if she wanted to. I—she is under a kind of obligation to me."

"Thank God for that. I only hope you are in a position to threaten her with blackmail."

"I could if anybody could," Nancy said. She put out of her mind as disloyal, the faintly unpleasant suggestion of his words. He owed her mythical patron a substantial sum of money by this time. He was not even able to pay Michael the cash for the nightly teapot full of Chianti that Nancy herself now sent out for him regularly. For the first time since her association with him she was tempted to compare him to Dick, and that not very favorably; but at the next instant she was reproaching herself with her littleness of vision. He was too great a man to gauge by the ordinary standards of life. Money meant nothing to him except that it was the insignificant means to the end of that Art, which was to him consecrated.

They were placed a little to the left of the glowing fire—Nancy had restored the fireplace in the big central dining-room—and the light took the brass of the andirons, and all the polished surface of copper and pewter and silver candelabra that gave the room its quality of picturesqueness.

"Some of those branching candlesticks are very beautiful," he said; "the impression here is a little like that of a Catholic altar just before the mass. I've always thought I'd like to have my meals served in church, Saint-Germain-des-Pres for instance."

"It is rather dim religious light." Nancy had no wish to utter this banality, but it was forced from her by her desire to seem sympathetic.

"Can we go to your place for a little while to-night?"

These were the words she had spent her days and nights hungering for; yet now she hesitated for a perceptible instant.

"Yes, we can, of course. There is a friend of mine—Billy Boynton, up there this evening. He is not feeling very fit, and phoned to ask if he could go up and sprawl before my fire, so, of course, I said he could."

"Oh! yes, Sheila's friend. Can't he be disposed of?"

"I think so. We could try."

But at Nancy's apartment they found not only Billy, but Caroline, and the atmosphere was like that of the glacial regions, both literally and figuratively.

"Hitty had the windows open, and the fire went out, and I forgot to turn on the heat," Billy explained from his position on the hearth where he was trying to build an unscientific fire with the morning paper, and the remains of a soap box. There was a long smudge across his forehead.

Caroline drew Nancy into the seclusion of her bedroom and clutched her violently by the arm.

"I can't stand the strain any longer," she cried, "you've got to tell me. Are you or are you not going to marry Dick Thorndyke for his money, and is Billy Boynton putting you up to it—out of cowardice?"

"No, I'm not and he isn't," Nancy said. "What's the matter with you and Billy anyway?"

"I haven't seen him for weeks before. I just happened to be in this neighborhood to-night, and ran in here, and there he was."

"Why don't you take him home with you?" Nancy said.

"I don't want him to go home with me."

"Don't you love him?"

"Oh, I don't know. That isn't the point."

"It is the point," Nancy said; "there isn't any other point to the whole of existence. There's nothing else in the world, but love, the great, big, beautiful, all-giving-up kind of love, and bearing children for the man you love; and if you don't know that yet, Caroline, go down on your bended knees and pray to your God that He will teach it to you before it is too late."

"I—I didn't know you felt like that," Caroline gasped.

"Well, I do," Nancy said, "and I think that any woman who doesn't is just confusing issues, and taking refuge in sophistry. I wouldn't give that"—she snapped an energetic forefinger, "for all your silly, smug little ideas of economic independence and service to the race, and all that tommy-rot. There is only one service a woman can do to her race, and that is to take hold of the problems of love and marriage,—and the problems of life, birth and death that are involved in them—and work them out to the best of her ability. They will work out."

"You—you're a sort of a pragmatist, aren't you?" Caroline gasped.

"Billy loves you, and you love Billy. Billy needs you. He is the most miserable object lately, that ever walked the face of the earth. I'm going to call a taxi-cab, and send you both home in it, and when you get inside of it I want you to put you arms around Billy's neck, and make up your quarrel."

"I won't do that," said Caroline, "but—but somehow or other you've cleared up something for me. Something that was worrying me a good deal."

"Shall I call the taxi?" Nancy said inexorably.

"Well, yes—if—if you want to," Caroline said.

The fire was crackling merrily in the drawing-room when she stepped into it again after speeding her departing guests. Collier Pratt was walking up and down impatiently with his hands clasped behind his back.

"You got rid of them at last," he said. "I was afraid they would decide to remain with us indefinitely."

"I didn't have as much trouble as I anticipated," admitted Nancy cryptically.

Collier Pratt made a round of the rose-shaded lamps in the room—there were three including a Japanese candle lamp,—and turned them all deliberately low. Then he held out his arms to Nancy.

"We'll snatch at the few moments of joy the gods will vouchsafe us," he said.



CHAPTER XVI

CHRISTMAS SHOPPING

Sheila and Nancy were doing their Christmas shopping. The weather, which had been like mid-May—even to betraying a bewildered Jersey apple tree into unseasonable bloom that gave it considerable newspaper notoriety,—had suddenly turned sharp and frosty. Sheila, all in gray fur to the beginning of her gray gaiters, and Nancy in blue, a smart blue tailor suit with black furs and a big black satin hat—she was dressing better than she had ever dressed in her life—were in that state of physical exhilaration that follows the spur of the frost.

"We mustn't dance down the avenue, Sheila," Nancy said, "it isn't done, in the circles in which we move."

"It is you who are almost very nearly dancing, Miss Dear," Sheila said, "I was only walking on my toetips."

"Oh! don't you feel good, Sheila?" Nancy cried.

"Don't you, Miss Dear?"

"I feel almost too good," Nancy said, "as if in another minute the top of the world might come off."

"The top of the world is screwed on very tight, I think," said Sheila. "I used to think when I was a little girl that it was made out of blue plush, but now I know better than that."

"It might be," Nancy argued, "blue plush and bridal veils. There's a great deal of filmy white about it, to-day."

"It's a long way off from Fifth Avenue," Sheila sighed, "too far. I am not going to think about it any more. I am going to think hard about what to give my father. Michael said to get a smoking set, but I don't know what a smoking set is. Hitty said some hand knit woolen stockings, but I am afraid he would be scratched by them. Gaspard said a big bottle of Cointreau, but I do not know what that is either."

"Couldn't we give him a beautiful brocaded dressing-gown and a Swiss watch, thin as a wafer, and some handkerchiefs cobwebby fine, and a dozen bottles of Cointreau, and—then get the other things as we think of them?"

"Are we rich enough to do that?" Sheila asked, her eyes sparkling with excitement.

"Rich enough to buy anything we want, Sheila," Nancy cried. "I had no idea it was going to be such a heavenly feeling. When you say your prayers to-night, Sheila, I hope you will ask God to bless somebody you've never heard of before. Elijah Peebles Martin, do you think you could remember that long name, Sheila?"

"Yes, Miss Dear,—do you remember him in your prayers every night?"

"Well, I haven't," Nancy said, "but I intend to from now on. Do you think Collier—father—would like to have a new pipe?"

"I don't know," Shelia said; "wouldn't Uncle Dick like to have one?"

"I don't know whether Uncle Dick is going to want a Christmas present from me or not, Sheila." Nancy answered seriously. "There may be—reasons why he won't come to see us for a while when he knows them."

"Oh, dear," Sheila said, "but I can buy him a Christmas present myself, can't I? I don't want it to be Christmas if I can't."

"Of course, dear. What shall we buy Aunt Caroline and Uncle Billy?"

"Some pink and blue housekeeping dishes, I think."

"I'm going to have trouble buying Caroline anything," Nancy said. "She's so sure I can't afford it. If I give a silver chest I'll have to make Billy say it came from his maiden aunt."

"What shall we give Aunt Betty?"

"I don't know exactly why," Nancy said, "but someway I feel more like giving her a good shaking than anything else."

"For a little surprise," Sheila said presently, "do you think we could go down to see my father in his studio, after we have shopped? I feel like seeing my father to-day. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I think of Hitty and my breakfast, and the canary bird, and of you, Miss Dear, fast asleep where I can hear you breathing in your room—if I listen to it—and then other mornings I wake up thinking only of my father, and how he looks in his shirt-sleeves and necktie. I was thinking of him this morning like that. So now I should like to see him."

"You shall, dear. I want him to see you in your new clothes. He'll think you look like a little gray bird with a scarlet breast."

"Then I must open the front of my coat when I go in so he shall see my vest at once, mustn't I?"

"Do you know how much I love you, Sheila?" Nancy cried suddenly.

"Is it a great deal, Miss Dear?"

"It's more than I've ever loved anybody in this world but one person, and if I should ever be separated from you I think it would break my heart—so that you could hear it crack with a loud report, Sheila."

The little girl slipped her gray gloved hand into Nancy's and held it there silently for a moment.

"Then we won't ever be separated, Miss Dear," she said.

The shops were crowded with the usual conglomerate Christmas throng, and their progress was somewhat retarded by Sheila's desire to make the acquaintance of every department-store and Salvation Army Santa Claus that they met in their peregrinations. In the toy department of one of the Thirty-fourth Street shops there was a live Kris Kringle with animated reindeers on rollers, who made a short trip across an open space in one end of the department for a consideration, and presented each child who rode with him a lovely present, tied up in tissue and marked "Not to be opened until Christmas." Sheila refused a second trip with him on the ground that it would not be polite to take more than one turn.

Nancy was able to discover the little girl's preferences by a tactful question here and there when they were making the rounds of the different counters. She wanted, it developed, a golden-haired doll with a white fur coat, a pair of roller skates, an Indian costume, a beaded pocketbook, with a blue cat embroidered on it, a parchesi board to play parchesi with her Uncle Dick, some doll's dinner dishes, a boy's bicycle, some parlor golf sticks, a red leather writing set, a doll's manicure set, a sailor-boy paper doll, a dozen small suede animals in a box, a drawing book and crayon pencils and several other trifles of a like nature. The things she did not want she rejected unerringly. It pleased Nancy to realize that she knew exactly what she did want, even though her range of taste was so extensive. Nancy had a sheaf of her own cards with her address on them in her pocketbook, and each time Sheila saw the thing her heart coveted Nancy nodded to the saleswoman and whispered to her to send it to the address given and charge to her account.

They took their lunch in a famous confectionary shop, full of candy animals and alluring striped candy sticks and baskets. Here Sheila's eye was taken by a basket of spun sugar flowers, which she insisted on buying for Gaspard. By the time they were ready to resume their shopping tour, Sheila began to show signs of fag, so they bought only brooches for the waitresses, and the watch as thin and exquisite of workmanship as a man's pocket watch could be, for Collier Pratt.

"I think we had better give it to him now, Miss Dear," Sheila decided. "I don't see how he can wait till Christmas for it—it is so beautiful. He has not had a gold watch since that time in Paris when we had all that trouble."

"What trouble, Sheila dear?" Nancy said. She had tucked the child in a hansom, and they were driving slowly through the lower end of Central Park to restore Sheila's roses before she was exhibited to her parent.

"When we lost all our money, and my father and some one I must not speak of, had those dreadful quarrelings, and we ran away. I do not like to think of it. My father does not like to think of it."

"Well, then, you mustn't, dear," Nancy said, "but just be glad it is all over now. I don't like to realize that so many hard things happened to you and him before I knew you, but I do like to think that I can perhaps prevent them ever happening to you again."

She closed resolutely that department of her mind that had begun to occupy itself with conjectures concerning the past of the man to whom she had given her heart. The child's words conjured up nightmare scenes of unknown panic and dread. It was terrible to her to know that Collier Pratt had the memory of so much bitterness and distress of mind and body locked away in the secret chambers of his soul. "Some one of whom I must not speak," Sheila had said, "and some one of whom I must not think," Nancy added to herself. It was probably some one with whom he had quarreled and struggled passionately maybe, with disastrous results. He could not have injured or killed anybody, else how could he be free and honorably considered in a free and honorable country? She laughed at her own melodramatic misgivings. It was only, she realized, that she so detested the connotation of the words "ran away." Nancy had never run away from anything or anybody in her life, and she could not understand that any one who was close to her should ever have the instinct of flight.

The most conscientious objector to New York's traffic regulations can not claim that they fail to regulate. The progress of their cab down the avenue was so scrupulously regulated by the benignant guardians of the semaphores that twilight was deepening into early December evening before they reached their objective point,—the ramshackle studio building on the south side of Washington Square where the man she loved lived, moved and had his being, with the gallant ease and grace which made him so romantic a figure to Nancy's imagination.

She had never been to his studio before without an appointment, and her heart beat a little harder as, Sheila's hand in hers, they tiptoed up the worn and creaking stairs, through the ill-kept, airless corridors of the dingy structure, till they reached the top, and stood breathless from their impetuous ascent, within a few feet of Collier Pratt's battered door.

"I feel a little scared, Miss Dear," Sheila whispered. "I thought it was going to be so much fun and now I don't think so at all. Do you think he will be very angry at my coming?"

"I don't think he will be angry at all," Nancy said. "I think he will be very much surprised and pleased to see both of us. Turn around, dear, and let me be sure that you're neat."

Sheila turned obediently. Nancy fumbled with her pocket mirror, and then thought better of it, but passed a precautionary hand over the back of her hair to reassure herself as to its arrangement, and straightened her hat.

"Now we're ready," she said.

But Sheila put out her hand, and clutched at Nancy's sleeve.

"There's some one in there," she said, "somebody crying. Oh! don't let's go in, Miss Dear."

From behind the closed door there issued suddenly the confused murmur of voices, one—a woman's—rising and falling in the cadence of distress, the other low pitched in exasperated expostulation.

"It's Collier," Nancy said mechanically, "and some woman with him."

Sheila shrank closer into the protecting shelter of her arms.

"Don't let's go in, Miss Dear," she repeated.

"It may be just some model," Nancy said. "We'll wait a minute here and see if she doesn't come out."

"I—I don't want to see who comes out," the child said, her face suddenly distorted.

There was a sharp sound of something falling within, then Collier Pratt's voice raised loud in anger.

"You'd better go now," he said, "before you do any more damage. I don't want you here. Once and for all I tell you that there is no place for you in my life. Weeping and wailing won't do you any good. The only thing for you to do is to get out and stay out."

This was answered by an indistinguishable outburst.

"I won't tell you where the child is," Collier Pratt said steadily. "She's well taken care of. God knows you never took care of her. There's nothing you can do, you know. You might sue for a restitution of conjugal rights, I suppose, but if you drag this thing into the courts I'll fight it out to the end. I swear I will."

"You brute,—you—"

At the first clear sound of the woman's voice the child at Nancy's side broke into sobs of convulsive terror.

"Take me away, Miss Dear. Oh! take me away from here, quickly, quickly, I'm so frightened. I'm so afraid she'll come out and get me. It's my mother," she moaned.



CHAPTER XVII

GOOD-BY

Nancy had no memory of her actions during the time that elapsed between leaving the studio building and her arrival at her own apartment. She knew that she must have guided Sheila to the beginning of the bus route at the lower end of the square, and as perfunctorily signaled the conductor to let her off at the corner of Fifth Avenue and her own street, but she could never remember having done so. Her first conscious recollection was of the few minutes in Sheila's room, while she was slipping off the child's gaiters, in the interval before she gave her over to Hitty for the night. The little girl was still sobbing beneath her breath, though her emotion was by this time purely reflexive.

"I didn't understand that your mother was living, Sheila," she said.

"She isn't very nice," the little girl said miserably. "We don't tell any one. She always cries and screams and makes us trouble?"

"Did she live with you in Paris?"

"Only sometimes."

"Does she do—something that she should not do, Sheila?" Nancy asked, with her mind on inebriety, or drug addiction.

"She just isn't very nice," Sheila repeated. "She is histerique; she pounded me with her hands, and hurt me."

Nancy telephoned to the Inn that she had a headache, and shut herself into her room, without food, to gather her scattered forces. She lay wide-awake all the night through, her mind trying to work its way through the lethargy of shock it had received. She remembered falling down the cellar stairs, when she was a little girl, and lying for hours on the hard stone floor, perfectly serene and calm, without pain, until she tried to do so much as move a little finger or lift an eyelid, when the intolerable nausea would begin. She was calm now, until she made the attempt to think what it was that had so prostrated her, and then the anguish spread through her being and convulsed her with unimaginable distress of mind and body.

By morning she had herself in hand again,—at least to the extent of dealing with the unthinkable fact that Collier Pratt, her lover, the man to whom she had given the lover's right to hold her in his arms and cover her upturned face with kisses, had a living wife, and that he was not free to make honorable love to any woman.

Her life had been too sound, too sweet, to give her any perspective on a situation of the kind. It was inconceivable to her that a married man should make advances to an unmarried woman,—but gradually she began to make excuses for this one man whose circumstances had been so exceptional. Tied to an insane creature, who beat his child, who made him strange hectic scenes, and followed him all over the world to threaten his security, and menace that beautiful and inexplicable creative instinct that animated him like a holy fire, and set him apart from his kind; she began to see how it might be with him. She was still the woman he loved,—she believed that; he was weaker than she had thought,—that was all, weaker and not so wise. This being true, she must put aside her own pain and bewilderment, her own devastating disillusionment, and comfort him, and help him. She rose from her bed that morning firmly resolved to see him before the day was through.

She breakfasted with Sheila, and made a brave attempt to get through the morning on her usual schedule, but once at the Inn she collapsed, and Michael and Betty had to put her in a cab and send her home again, where Hitty ministered to her grimly,—and she slept the sleep of exhaustion until well on into the evening, and into the night again.

On the day following she was quite herself; but she still hesitated to bring about the momentous interview that she so dreaded, and yet longed for. She intended to take her place at the table beside Collier Pratt when he came for his dinner that night, but when the time came she could not bring herself to do it, and fled incontinently. Later in the evening he telephoned that he wanted to see her, and she told him that he might come.

She faced him with the facts, breathlessly, and in spite of herself accusingly,—and then waited for the explanation that would extenuate the apparent ugliness of his attitude toward her, and set all the world right for her again. As she looked into his face she felt that it must come. She noted compassionately how the shadows under the dark eyes had deepened; how weary the pose of the fine head; and for the moment she longed only to rest it on her breast again. Even as she spoke of the thing that had so tortured her it seemed insignificant in light of the fact that he was there beside her, within reach of her arms whenever she chose to hold them out to him.

"I regret that the revelation of my private embarrassments should have been thrust upon you so suddenly," he said, when she had poured out the story to him. "My marriage has proved the most uncomfortable indiscretion that I ever committed; and unfortunately my indiscretions have been numberless as the well-known leaves of Vallombrosa."

"You always said that Sheila was motherless," Nancy said.

"It is simpler than stating that she is worse than motherless."

"Why didn't you tell me you were married?"

Collier Pratt smiled at her—kindly it seemed to Nancy.

"It hadn't anything to do with us," he said. "I should never want to marry again—even if I were free. The thought is horrible to me. You mean a great deal to me. Think, if you doubt that and think again. I have had in this little front room of yours the only real moments of peace and happiness that I have had for years. I value them—you can not dream or imagine how much—but surely it is understood between us that our relation can not be anything but transitory. I am an artist with a way to make for my art: you are a working woman with a career, odd as it is," he smiled whimsically, "that you have chosen, and that you will pursue faithfully until some stalwart young man dissuades you from it, when you will take your place in your niche as wife and mother, and leave me one more beautiful memory."

"Surely," Nancy said, "you know it isn't—like that."

"What is it like then?"

Nancy felt every sane premise, every eager hope and delicate ideal slipping beyond her reach as she faced his mocking, tender eyes.

"It can't be that you believe you have been—fair with me," she faltered.

"I don't think I have been unfair," he said, "I have made no protestations, you know."

Nancy shut her eyes. Curious scraps of her early religious education came back to her.

"You have partaken of my bread and wine," she said.

"It wasn't exactly consecrated."

"I think it was," she said faintly. "Oh! don't you understand that that isn't a way for a man to think or to feel about a woman like me?"

"Little American girl," Collier Pratt said, "little American girl, don't you understand that there is only one way for a woman to think or feel about a man like me? I have had my life, and I haven't liked it much. I'm to be loved warmly and lightly till the flesh and blood prince comes along, but I'm never to be mistaken for him."

"I don't believe you're sincere," Nancy cried; "women must have loved you deeply, tragically, and have suffered all the torture there is, at losing you."

"That may be. Sincerity is a matter of so many connotations. You haven't known many artists, my dear."

"No," said Nancy. "No, but I thought they were the same as other men, only worthier."

"How should they be? He who perceives a merit is not necessarily he who achieves it. Else the world would be a little more one-sided than it is."

"I can't believe those things," Nancy said. "I want to believe in you. You must care for me, and what becomes of me. You have known so long what I was like, and what I was made for. All this seems like a terrible nightmare. I want you to tell me what it is you want of me, and let me give it to you."

"I am proving some faint shadow of worthiness at least, when I say to you that I want absolutely nothing of you. I love, but I refrain."

"You love," Nancy cried, "you love?"

"Not as you understand loving, I am afraid. In my own way I love you."

"I don't like your way, then," Nancy said wearily.

"We're both so poor, little girl,—that's one thing. If I were free and could overcome my prejudice against matrimony, and could be a little surer of my own heart and its constancy,—even then, don't you see, practical considerations would and ought to stand in our way. I couldn't support you, you couldn't possibly support me."

"I see," said Nancy. "Would you marry me If I were rich?" she said slowly.

"I already have one wife," Collier Pratt smiled. Nancy remembered afterward that he smiled oftener during this interview than at any other. "But if somebody died, and left you a million, she might possibly be disposed of."

For one moment, perhaps, his fate hung in the balance. Then he took a step forward.

"Kiss me good night, dear," he said, "and let us end this bitter and fruitless discussion."

"Kiss you good night," Nancy cried. "Kiss you good night. Oh! how dare you!—How dare you?" And she struck him twice across his mouth. "I wish I could kill you," she blazed. "Oh! how dare you,—how dare you?"

"Oh! very well," said Collier Pratt calmly, wiping his mouth with his handkerchief. "If that's the way you feel—then our pleasant little acquaintanceship is ended. I'll take my hat and stick and my child—and go."

"Your child?" Nancy cried aghast. "You wouldn't take Sheila away from me."

"I don't feel exactly tempted to leave her with you," he said deliberately. "I don't mind a woman striking me—I'm used to that; it is one of my charming wife's ways of expressing herself in moments of stress—but I do object to any but the most purely formal relations with her afterward. There is a certain degree of intimacy involved in your having charge of my child. I think I will take the little girl away with me now."

"Please, please, please don't," Nancy said. "I love her. I couldn't bear it now. You can't be so cruel."

"Better get it over," Collier Pratt said. "Will you call Hitty, or shall I?"

"Sheila is in bed," Nancy cried. "You wouldn't take her out of her warm bed to-night. I'll send her to you to-morrow at whatever hour you ask."

"I ask for her now."

There was no fight left in Nancy. She called Hitty and superintended the dressing of the little girl to its last detail. She could not touch her.

"Won't you kiss me good night, Miss Dear?" Sheila said, drowsily, as she took her father's hand at the door.

"Not to-night," Nancy said hoarsely. "I've a bad throat, dear, I wouldn't want you to catch it."

"I don't know where I'm going," the little girl said, "but I suppose my father knows. I'll come back as soon as I can."

"Yes, dear," Nancy said. "Good-by."

Collier Pratt turned at the door and made an exaggerated gesture of farewell.

"We part more in anger than in sorrow," he said.

"Oh! Go," Nancy cried.

As the door closed upon the two Nancy sank to her knees, and thence to a crumpled heap on the floor, but remembering that Hitty would find her there shortly, and being entirely unable to regain her feet unaided, she started to crawl in the direction of her own room, and presently arrived there, and pushed the door to behind her with her heel.



CHAPTER XVIII

TAME SKELETONS

It was Sunday night, and New Year's Eve. Gaspard was preparing, and Molly and Dolly were serving a special dinner for Preston Eustace, planned weeks before on his first arrival in New York.

Before the great logs—imported by Michael for the occasion—that blazed in the fireplace, a round table was set, decorously draped in the most immaculate of fine linen, and crowned with a wreath of holly and mistletoe, from which extended red satin trailers with a present from Nancy for each guest, on the end of each. All the impedimenta of the restaurant was cleared away, and a couch and several easy chairs that Nancy kept in reserve for such occasions were placed comfortably about the room. Only the innumerable starry candles and branching candelabra were reminiscent of the room's more professional aspect.

Billy and Caroline were the first to arrive,—Caroline in pale floating green tulle, which accentuated the pure olive of her coloring, and transported Billy from his chronic state of adoration to that of an almost agonizing worship. Dick and Betty were next. He had realized the possible awkwardness of the situation for her, and had been thoughtful enough to offer to call for her. She was in defiant scarlet from top to toe, and had never looked more entrancing. Preston Eustace was to come in from Long Island where he was spending the holidays with a married sister. Michael received the guests and did the honors beamingly.

"Where's Nancy?" Dick asked, as, divested of his outer garments, he appeared without warning in the presence of the lovers. "Don't bother to drop her hand, Billy. I don't see how you have the heart to, she's so lovely to-night."

"We don't know where Nancy is," Caroline answered for him. "It seems to be all right, though. She's expected, Michael says."

"Where's Nancy?" Betty asked, in her turn, appearing on the threshold with every hair most amazingly in place.

"Coming," Dick reassured her.

"Has anybody heard from her?" Betty asked.

"Michael has, I think."

"You aren't worried about her, are you?" Caroline asked.

"Yes, I am," Betty said.

"I thought you and Nancy were rather on the outs," Caroline suggested. "It seems odd to have you worrying about her like her maiden aunt."

"You wait till you see her, you'll be worried about her, too."

"What's wrong?" Dick asked quickly.

"She's lost Sheila for one thing. That unspeakable Collier Pratt—I hope he chokes on his dinner to-night, and I hope it's a rotten dinner—has taken the child away."

"The devil he has."

There was a step on the rickety stair.

"Hush! There she is now," Caroline cried.

"No," Betty said quietly, listening. "That's not Nancy. That's your brother, Caroline."

"I haven't heard his step for such a long time I've forgotten it," Billy said.

"I haven't heard it for a long time either," Betty said, her face draining of its last bit of color.

"Promises to be one of those merry little meals when everybody present is attended by a tame skeleton," Billy whispered, "except us, Caroline."

"I don't feel that we have any right to be so happy with the whole continent of Europe in the state it's in," Caroline whispered in reply.

"I feel better about the continent of Europe than I did a while back," Billy said, contentedly.

"Hello, everybody," Preston Eustace said as Michael held the door for him. "How's everything, Caroline?"

"All right," Caroline said. Then she added unnecessarily, "You—you know Betty, don't you?"

"I used to know Betty," he said slowly.

The two looked at each other, with that look of incredulity with which lovers sometimes greet each other after absence and estrangement. "This can't be you," their eyes seem to be saying, "I've disposed of you long since, God help me!"

"How do you do, Preston?" Betty said, giving him her hand. Then she smiled faintly, and added with a caricature of her usual manner: "Lovely weather we're having for this time of year, aren't we?"

"I'm very fond of you, Betty,"—Dick smiled as she sank into the chair beside him and Preston turned to his sister. "I think you're a little sport."

"I don't know how you can, Dicky," she smiled at him forlornly. "I've got a bad black heart, and I play the wrong kind of games."

"Well, I see through them, so it's all right. What's this about Nancy?"

"I'll tell you later," Betty said; "there she comes now."

Nancy, stimulated by massage and steam, her hair dressed by a professional; powdered, and for the first time in her life rouged to hide the tell-tale absence of her natural quickening color, came forward to meet her guests in supreme unconsciousness of the pathos of the effect she had achieved. She was dressed in snowy white like a bride,—the only gown she had that was in keeping with the holiday decorations, and she moved a little clumsily, as if her brain had found itself suddenly in charge of an unfamiliar set of reflexes. Her lids drooped over burning eyes that had known no sleep for many nights, and every line and lineament of her face was stamped with pain.

"I'm so sorry to have kept you waiting," she said. Her voice, curiously, was the only natural thing about her. "I've been scouring off every vestige of my work-a-day self, and that takes time. Thank you for the roses, Dick, but the only flowers I could have worn with this color scheme would have been geraniums."

"I'll send you some geraniums to-morrow."

"Don't," she said. "How do you do, Preston?"

She gave him a cold hand, and he stared at her almost as he had stared at Betty. He was a tall grave-looking youth, with Caroline's straight features and olive coloring, and a shock of heavy blond hair.

"I hope you'll like your party," Nancy hurried on. "Gaspard is bursting with pride in it. I think it would be a nice thing to have him in and drink his health after the coffee. He would never forget the honor."

"My God!" Dick said in an undertone to Betty, "how long has she been like this?"

"I'll tell you later," she promised him again.

With the serving of the first course of dinner—Gaspard's wonderful Puree Mongol—an artist's dream of all the most delicate vegetables in the world mingled together as the clouds are mingled, the tensity in the air seemed to break and shatter about them in showers of brilliant, artificial mirth, which presently, because they were all young and fond of one another and their group had the habit of intimacy, became less and less strained and unreal.

Nancy's tired eyes lost something of their unnatural glitter, and Betty seemed more of a woman than a scarlet sprite, while Caroline's smile began to reflect something of the real gladness that possessed her soul. Dick and Billy took up the burden of the entertainment of the party, and gave at least an excellent imitation of inspirational gaiety.

"This filet of sole," Billy observed as he sampled his second course appreciatively, "is common or barnyard flounder,—and the shrimp and the oyster crab, and that mushroom of the sea, and the other little creature in the corner of my plate who shall be nameless, because I have no idea what his name is,—are all put in to make it harder."