"Gaspard is using some of the simpler native products now instead of the high-priced imported ones," Nancy said eagerly, "and he is getting wonderful results, I think."

"Flounder a la Francaise is all right," Dick said.

"Our restaurant has reformed," Betty said. "We're running it on a strictly business basis."

"And making money?" Dick asked quickly.

"We're not losing much," Betty said. "That's a great improvement."

"Some of those little girls from the publishing houses look paler to me than they did," Nancy said. "I wish I could give them hypodermics of protein and carbohydrates."

"Give me the name and address of any of your customers that worry you," Dick said, "and I'll buy 'em a cow or a sugar plum tree or a flivver or anything else they seem to be in need of."

"Don't those things tend to pauperize the poor?" Caroline's brother put in gravely.

"Sure they do," Billy agreed, "only Nancy has kind of given up her struggle not to pauperize them."

"I started in with some very high ideals about scientific service," Nancy explained. "I was never going to give anybody anything they hadn't actually earned in some way, except to bring up the average of normality by feeding my patrons surreptitious calories. I had it all figured out that the only legitimate charity was putting flesh on the bones of the human race,—that increasing the general efficiency that way wasn't really charity at all."

"You don't believe that now?" Preston Eustace asked.

"I don't know what I believe now."

"What is scientific charity, anyhow?" Dick looked about inquiringly.

"There ain't no such animal," Billy contributed.

"It's substituting the cool human intellect for the warm human heart, I guess," Betty said dreamily.

"But that so often works," Caroline said.

"I was never going to make any mistakes," Nancy said. "I was going to keep my fists scientifically shut, and my heart beatifically open." She hesitated. "I—I was going to swing my life, and my undertakings—right." It became increasingly hard for her to speak, and a little gasp went round the table. "I've—I've made nothing—nothing but mistakes," she finished piteously.

"But you've rectified them," Betty put in vigorously. "Nancy, dear, I've never known you to make a mistake that you haven't rectified, and that is more than I can say of any other person in the world."

"Sirloin and carrots," Caroline said, as the next course came in. "I'll wager you've cut the price of this dinner in two by judicious ordering."

"There's nothing else but field salad," Nancy said, still piteously, "and raspberry mousse."

"Nancy, you'll break my heart," Betty said, wiping her eyes frankly, but Nancy only looked at her wonderingly, wistfully, preoccupied and remote, while Preston Eustace gazed at Betty as if he too would find a welcome relief in shedding a heavy tear or two.

"Collier Pratt has broken her heart, Dick," Betty told him in the limousine on the way home. "It's been going on ever since the first time she saw him. Down at the restaurant we've all known it. She's been eating at his table every night for months, and Gaspard and everybody else in the place, in fact, has been a slave to his lightest whim. I've always disliked him intensely, myself."

"Why didn't you tell me before, Betty?"

"It wasn't my business to tell you. I thought it was coming off, you know."

"What was coming off?"

"Their affair. I thought it was past my meddling."

"Do you mean to say that you thought Nancy was going to marry Collier Pratt—Nancy?"

"Why, yes, if I hadn't I—I wouldn't have acted up the way I did in your rooms that night."

But Dick neither heard nor understood her.

"Do you mean to say that you think Collier Pratt has been making love to her?"

"I think so."

"But the damned scoundrel is married."

"Oh!" Betty cried. "Oh!—I didn't know that."

"I've known it—I've always known it," Dick said. "I never dreamed that Nancy had any special interest in him."

"Well, she had. She's going through everything, Dick, even Sheila—you know how she loved Sheila?"

"I know," Dick said grimly. "Do you mind going on home alone, Betty? You'll be perfectly safe with Williams, you know."

"Of course not. What are you going to do, Dick? Are you going to Nancy?"

"No, I'm not going to Nancy."

Betty, looking at him more closely, realized for the first time that she was sitting beside a man in whom the rage of the primitive animal was gaining its ascendency. His breath was coming in short stertorous gasps, his hands were clinched, the purplish color was mounting to his brows, but he still went through the motions of a courteous leave-taking.

"Where are you going, Dick?" she asked again, as he stood on the curb where he had signaled Williams to leave him, with the door of the car in his hand, staring down at it, and for the moment forgetting to close it.

"I'm going to find Collier Pratt," he said thickly. Then with a slam that splintered the hinge of the door he was holding he crashed it in toward the car.



CHAPTER XIX

OTHER PEOPLE'S TROUBLES

Nancy was trying conscientiously to interest herself in other people's troubles. After the first great shock of pain following her loss at a blow of her lover and Sheila, she began automatically to try to work her way through her suffering. The habit of application to the daily task combined with her instinct for taking immediate action in a crisis stood her in good stead in her hour of need. She decided what to occupy herself with, and then devoted herself faithfully to the prescribed occupation.

The Inn did not need her. With Betty to guide him economically Gaspard was able to superintend all the details of the establishment adequately and artistically. Sheila was gone. She packed up several trunks of dresses and toys and other childish belongings and sent them to Washington Square, but even without these constant reminders of her, the hunger for the child's presence did not abate. The little girl was curiously dissociated from her father in Nancy's mind. She had seen so little of the two together that they seemed to belong to entirely different compartments of her consciousness. It was only the anguish of losing them that linked them together.

Nancy decided to devote a certain proportion of her days and nights to remedying such evils as lay under her immediate observation;—to helping the individuals with whom she came into daily contact—the dependents and tradespeople with whom she dealt. She had always been convinced that the people who ministered to her daily comfort in New York should occupy some part in her scheme of existence. It was one of her favorite arguments that a little more energy and imagination on the part of New York citizens would develop the communal spirit which was so painfully lacking in the soul of the average Manhattanite.

So the milkman and the corner grocer, the newspaper man, and Hitty's small brood of grand nieces and nephews, to say nothing of the Italian fruit man's family, and her laundress's invalid daughter, were all occupying a considerable place in Nancy's daily schedule. In a very short interval she had the welfare of more than half a dozen families on her hands, and was involved in all manner of enterprises of a domestic nature,—from the designing of confirmation gowns to the purchase of rubber-tired rolling chairs, and heterogeneous woolen garments and other intimate necessities.

She was a little ashamed of her new line of activities, and still hurt enough to shun the scrutiny of her friends, and thereby succeeded in mystifying and alarming Billy and Dick and Betty and Caroline almost beyond the limit of their endurance by resolutely keeping them at arm's length. She was supremely unconscious of anything at all remarkable in her behavior, and believed that they accepted her excuses and apologies at their face value. She had no conception of the fact that her tortured face, with tragedy looking newly out of her eyes, kept them from their rest at night.

Sheila wrote to thank her for sending the trunks.

* * * * *

"My dear, ma chere, Miss Dear," she said. "Merci beaucoup pour my clothes and other beautiful things. I like them. Je t'aime—je t'aime toujours. My father will not permit me to go back. Comme—how I desire to see you! My father has been sick. He fell down or was hurt in the street. There was blood—a great deal. Are they well—the others? Tell Monsieur Dick I give him tout mon coeur. Come to see me if it is permit. No more. You could write peut-etre. Je t'aime."

"Yours, "SHEILA."

* * * * *

Nancy read this letter, in the quaint childish hand, with a great wave of dumb sickness creeping over her—a devastating, disintegrating nausea of soul and body. The most significant fact in it, however, that Collier Pratt had fallen down "or been hurt in the street," of course escaped her entirely, except to stir her with a kind of dim pity for his distress.

In one of her long night vigils Preston Eustace's face came back to her oddly. She remembered suddenly the strange sad way he had stared at Betty on the evening of her party at the Inn. She reconstructed Betty's love-story, and its sudden breaking off, three years before, and with her new insight into the human heart, decided that these two loved each other still, and must be helped to the consummation of their happiness. She telephoned to them both the next day that they could be of service to her; and made an appointment to meet them at a given hour the next evening at her apartment.

She expected and intended to be there herself to give the meeting the semblance of coincidence, and to offer them the hospitality of her house before she was inspired with the excuse that would permit her an exit that left them alone together; but she found herself in the slums of Harlem by an Italian baby's bedside at that hour, and decided that even to telephone would be superfluous, as once finding each other the lovers would be oblivious to all other considerations.

What actually happened was that Preston Eustace, exactly on time as was his habit, had been waiting some ten minutes on Nancy's hearth-rug when Betty, delayed by the eccentricities of a casual motor-bus engine, and frantic with anxiety for her friend, burst in upon him. So full was she of the most hectic speculations concerning Nancy's sudden appeal to her that she scarcely noticed who was waiting there to greet her, and when she did notice, scarcely heeded that recognition.

"Where's Nancy?" she demanded breathlessly.

"I don't know, Betty," Preston Eustace said.

"Doesn't Hitty know?"

"She says she doesn't!"

"How did you happen to be here?"

"She sent for me."

"She's probably sent for everybody else," Betty said. "She's killed herself, I know she has."

"What makes you think so?"

"Her heart is broken, she's been suffering terribly."

"I don't think she would have sent for me if she had been going to kill herself," Preston Eustace said, a little as if he would have added, "We are not on those terms."

"I don't suppose she would," Betty said. "But oh, Preston, I'm so worried about her. I don't know where she is or anything. I tell you her heart is broken."

"I didn't know you believed in hearts—broken or otherwise, Betty."

"I believe in Nancy's heart."

"You never believed in mine."

"You never gave me much reason to, Preston. You—you let me give you back your ring the first time I threatened to."

"Of course I did."

"You never came near me again."

"Of course I didn't."

"You let three years go by without a word."

"Of course—"

"If you say 'of course I did' again I'll fly straight up through this roof. If you'd ever loved me you wouldn't have gone away and left me."

"If I hadn't loved you I wouldn't have gone away."

"Oh, dear," Betty sighed. "I don't see how you can stand there and think about yourself with Nancy out in the night—we don't know where."

"Ourselves, Betty—did you ever really love me?"

"It doesn't make any difference whether I did or not," Betty said. "I hate men."

"I think I'd better be going," Preston Eustace said, his face dark with pain. He was rather a literal-minded young man, as Caroline's brother would have been likely to be.

Betty buried her face in her hands.

"My head aches," she said, "and I was never in my life so mad and so miserable. I can't understand why everything and everybody should behave so—devilishly. You and every one else, I mean. I just simply can't bear to have Nancy suffer so. My head aches and my heart aches and my soul aches." She lifted her head defiantly.

"I think I had better be going," Preston Eustace repeated, looking down at her sorrowfully.

"Oh! don't be going," Betty said. "What in the name of sense do you want to be going for?" Then without warning or premeditation she hurled herself at his breast. "Oh! Preston, if there is anything comforting in this world," she said, "tell it to me, now."

Preston Eustace gathered her to his breast with infinite tenderness.

"I love you," he said with his lips on her brow. "Doesn't that comfort you a little?"

"Yes," she admitted, "yes," winding her arms about his neck, "but you have no idea what a little devil I am, Preston."

"I don't want to have any idea," he said, still holding her hungrily.

"No, I don't think you do," Betty said. "Oh! kiss me again, dear, and tell me you won't ever let me go now."

When Nancy came in she found the lovers so oblivious to the sound of her key in the latch or her footstep in the corridor that she decided to slip into bed without disturbing them, and did so, without their ever realizing that for the latter part of the evening at least, they had a hostess within range of the sound of their voices—indeed, she was obliged to stuff the pillow into her ears to prevent herself from actually hearing what they were saying.

* * * * *

At first her freedom—her release from the monotonous constraint of her daily confinement at the Inn—the unaccustomed independence of her new activities which justified her most untoward goings and comings—was very soothing to her. She liked the feeling of slipping out of the house at night, accountable to no one except the redoubtable Hitty to whom she presented any explanation that happened to occur to her,—however wide its departure from the actual facts—and losing herself in the resurgent town. But after a while her liberty lost its savor. She began to feel uncared for and neglected. The unaccountable anguish in her breast was neither assuaged nor mitigated by the geographical latitude she permitted herself. She kept doggedly on with her personally conducted philanthropies, but she began to feel a little frightened about her capacity for endurance. Her body and brain began to show strange signs of fatigue. She was afraid that one or the other might suddenly refuse to function.

One night, on coming out into the heterogeneous human stream on Avenue A, after a visit to a Polish family in the model tenements on Seventy-ninth Street, she ran into Dick.

"Why, Dick," she said, "what an extraordinary place to find you!"

"Yes, isn't it?" he said. "My business often brings me up this way."

"Your business? What business?" she asked incredulously.

"I don't know exactly what business it is. The ministering business, I guess." He motioned toward the basket on her arm: "Let me carry that, and you, too, if you'll let me, Nancy. You look tired."

"I am tired, Dick," she said. "Have you got a car anywhere around?"

"I can phone for it in two shakes," he said. "Here in this ice-cream parlor. Can I buy you a cone while you're waiting?"

"Buy cones for that crowd of children and I'll watch them eat them. Doesn't that little girl in the pink dress look like Sheila, Dick?"

She sank down on a stool in the interior of the candy shop and rested her elbows on the damp marble table in front of her, splotched and streaked still with the refreshment of the last customer who occupied the seat there and watched the horde of dirty clamorous street children devouring ice-cream cones and cheap sweets to the limit of their capacity.

"I didn't know you believed in this promiscuous feeding of children between meals," Dick said, when she was settled comfortably at last among the cushions of his car, which had arrived on the scene with an amazing, not to say, suspicious promptness.

"I don't," Nancy said, "in the least; but I don't really believe in the things I believe in any more."

"Poor Nancy!" Dick said.

"I've had some trouble, Dick. I'm shaken all out of my poise. I can't seem to get my universe straight again."

"I'm sorry for that," he said. "Anything I can do?"

"Stand by; that's all, I guess."

"You couldn't tell me a little more about it, could you?"

"No, I couldn't, Dick."

"I'm not even to guess?"

"You couldn't guess. It's the kind of thing that's entirely outside of—of the probabilities. I think it's outside of the range of your understanding, Dick. I don't think you know that there is exactly that kind of trouble in the world."

"And you think you'd better not enlighten me?"

"I couldn't, Dick, even if I wanted to. Funny you happened to be in this part of town to-night just when I really needed you."

He smiled. Every night of his life he followed her, watching over her, dodging down dark alley ways, waiting at squalid entrances until she came out. To-night he had ventured to speak to her only because he knew her to be in need of actual physical assistance.

"Awfully glad to be anywhere around when you need me," he said; "still I hope you don't mind my suggesting that this is a Gehenna of a place for either of us to be in."

"Haven't you any feeling for the downtrodden?" Nancy asked, with a faint reflection of what Billy referred to as her "older and better manner."

"I'm downtrodden myself, Nancy."

She smiled in her turn.

"You don't look very downtrodden to me," she said. "You've got everything to live for."

"Everything?"

"Well, money and freedom and—and—"

"Money is the only thing I've got that you haven't, and that doesn't mean much unless you can share it with the person you love."

"No, it doesn't, does it?" Nancy said unexpectedly. "What's that scar on your forehead?"

"That's a scratch I got."

"How?"

"Shaving or fighting, or something like that."

"Was it fighting, Dick?"

"Yes."

"Who were you fighting with?"

"I wasn't fighting. I was assaulting and battering."

"Why, Dick!"

"If it's any satisfaction to you to know it I made one grand job of it."

"Why should it be any satisfaction to me?"

"I don't know."

"Why, Dick!" Nancy said again. "I didn't know you had any of that kind of brutality in you."

"Didn't you?"

"What happens to a man when he—does a thing like that?"

"He gets jugged."

"Did he get jugged?"

"Well, that wasn't the part that interested me."

An odd picture presented itself to Nancy's mind of the men of the world engaged in one grand melee of brawling; struggling, belaying one another with their bare fists, drawing blood; brutes turned on brutes.

"Men are queer things," she said.

Dick's face was turned away from her. It was not at the moment a face she would have recognized. The eyes were contracted: the nostrils quivering: the teeth set.

"I'm always at your service, Nancy," he said presently. "Is there anything in the world you want that I can get for you?"

"The only thing I want is something you can't get?"

"And that is?"

"Sheila."

"No," Dick said. "I can't get Sheila for you. I'm sorry. I suppose that's the whole answer to you," he went on musingly. "You want something, somebody to mother—to minister to. It doesn't make so much difference what else it is, so long as it's—downtrodden. That's why I've never made more of a hit with you. I've never been downtrodden enough. I didn't need feeding or nursing. I've always sort of cherished the feeling that I liked to be the one creature you didn't have to carry on your back. I thought that to stand behind you was a pretty good stunt, but you've never needed anything yet to fall back on."

"I don't think I ever shall," Nancy said. "Not,—not in the way you mean, Dick."

"So be it," he said, folding his arms. "But there's still one thing you'll take from me, and that's the thing I've got that you haven't—money. I never have cared much about it before, but now that there are so many things I can't put right for you, I know you won't be selfish enough to deny this one satisfaction. Let me make over to you all the money you need to get you out of your difficulties with the Inn. Let me hand out a good round sum for all these charities of yours. If you knew how everything else in connection with you had conspired to hurt me,—how this being discounted and losing out all around has cut into me, you wouldn't deny me this one privilege. You don't want me, you wouldn't take me, but for God's sake, Nancy, take this one thing that I can give you."

They had just swung into the lower entrance of the Park, and the big car was speeding silently into the deepening night, low hung with silver stars, and jeweled with soft lights.

"You're awfully good to me, Dick," Nancy said, "and I appreciate every word you've been saying. I'd take your money, not for myself, but for the things I'm doing, if I needed it, but I don't, you know." She looked out into the coolness of the evening, lulled by the transition to a region of so much airiness and space, soothed by the soft motion, and the presence of a friend who loved her. The conversation in which she was engaged suddenly became trivial and unimportant to her. She was very tired, and she found herself beginning to rest and relax. "I don't need it," she repeated vaguely. "I've got plenty of money of my own. Over a million, Billy says now. Uncle Elijah left it to me. I didn't want him to, but perhaps it was all for the best." She put her head back against the cushions and shut her eyes. "I'm terribly sleepy," she said, "and as for the Inn—that's making money, too, you know. Last month we cleared more than two hundred dollars."

And Dick saying nothing, but continuing to stare into space—the panoramic space fleeting rhythmically by the car window,—she let herself gradually slip into the depths of sudden drowsiness that had overtaken her.



CHAPTER XX

HITTY

Hitty put on her bonnet—she had worn widow's weeds for twenty-five years—and went out into the morning. She finally succeeded in boarding a south-bound Sixth Avenue car,—though since it was her habit to ignore the near side stop regulation, she always had considerable trouble in getting on any car,—and in seating herself bolt upright on the lengthwise seat, her black gloved hands folded indomitably before her.

At Fourth Street she descended and made her way east to the square, and thence to the top floor of the studio building to which Collier Pratt had taken his little daughter on the memorable occasion when he had plucked her from her warm nest of blankets and led her, sleepy and shivering, into the cold of the night. She had been at some pains to secure the address without taking Nancy into her confidence.

She took each creaking stair with a snort of disgust, and reaching the battered door with Collier Pratt's visiting card tacked on the smeary panel on a level with her eye, she knocked sharply, and scorning to wait for a reply, turned the knob and walked in.

Collier Pratt was making coffee on a small spirit lamp, set on the wash-stand, which was decorously concealed during the more formal hours of the day behind a soft colored Japanese screen. He was wearing a smutty painter's smock, and though his face was shining with soap and water, his hair was standing about his face in a disorder eloquent of at least a dozen hours' neglect. Sheila, in a mussy gingham dress, was trying to pry off the pasteboard covering of a pint bottle of milk with a pair of scissors, and succeeding only indifferently. They both turned on Hitty's entrance, and the milk bottle went crashing to the floor when the little girl recognized her friend, but after one terrified look at her father she made no move at all in Hitty's direction.

"And to what," Collier Pratt ejaculated slowly and disagreeably, as is any man's wont before he has had his draught of breakfast coffee, "am I to attribute the pleasure of this visit?"

"It ain't no pleasure to me," Hitty said, advancing, a figure of menace, into the center of the dusty workshop, strangely uncouth and unprepossessing in the cold morning light,—"and if it's any pleasure to you, that's an effect that I ain't calculated to produce. I've come here on business—the business of collecting that poor neglected child there, and taking her back where she belongs, where there's folks that knows enough to treat her right."

"Another of Miss Martin's friends and well-wishers, I take it. These American girls are given to surrounding themselves with groups of warm and impulsive associates. Do you by any chance happen to know a young lawyer by the name of Boynton, Hitty? A collection lawyer?"

"I'll thank you to call me Mrs. Spinney, if you please, or if you don't please. Mrs. Spinney is the name I go by when I'm spoken to by them that knows their manners. If Billy Boynton thinks he can collect blood out of a stone he's welcome to try, but I should think he was too long headed to waste his time."

"I gave him my I. O. U.," Collier Pratt said wearily. "If you don't mind, Hitty,—I really must be excused from your inexcusable surname—I am going to drink a cup of coffee before we continue this interesting discussion—cafe noir, our late unfortunate accident depriving me of cafe au lait as usual. Sheila, get the cups."

"You don't mean to say that you feed that peaked child with full strength coffee, do you? It'll stunt her growth; ain't you got the sense to know that?"

"I don't like big women," Collier Pratt said. "She's very fond of coffee."

"Well! I've come to get her and take her away where you won't be in a position to stunt her growth, whatever your ideas on the subject is."

Collier Pratt seated himself at the deal table that Sheila had set with the coffee-cups and a big loaf of French bread, and began slowly consuming a bowl of inky fluid, strong of chicory, into which from time to time he dipped a portion of the loaf. Sheila imitated his processes with less daintiness and precision, since she was shaken with excitement at Hitty's appearance.

"I should spread a newspaper down if I was you," Hitty said, "before I et my vittles off a table that way. If a table ain't scrubbed as often as twice a day it ain't fit to be et off."

"I know your breed," Collier Pratt said. "You'd be capable of taking your breakfast off The Evening Telegram if no more appropriately colored sheet were at hand. Tell me, did Miss Martin send you here this morning, or was the inspiration to come entirely your own?"

"Nobody had to send me. Wild horses wouldn't have kept me away from here."

"Nor drag you away from here, I suppose, until your gruesome visit is accomplished. What makes you think that I would give up Sheila to you?"

"I don't think you would. I know you're a-goin' to."

"Indeed."

"We want the child. You don't want her, and you can't pretend to me that you do. Even if you did want her you can't take care of her in no way that's decent."

"There's a great deal in what you say, Hitty."

"What you're going to do is to sign a paper giving up your claim to her, and then Nancy can adopt her when she sees fitting to do so."

"What would you suggest my doing about the child's mother? She has a mother living, you know."

"Well, I didn't know," Hitty said, "but now I do know I guess I ain't going to have so much trouble as I thought I was. You're just a plain low-down yellow cur that any likely man I know would come down here and lick the lights out of."

"Well, don't send any more of them, Hitty," Collier Pratt protested. "My work won't stand it."

"You 'tend to the child's mother then, and I'll 'tend to you. You'd better let Sheila come away peaceable without any more trouble."

"What do you propose doing to me if I don't?"

"There's so many different things I could use," Hitty said thoughtfully, "that I don't know which one to hold over your head first."

"I don't see how you could use anything you've got."

"I'd just as soon use something I hadn't got," Hitty said grimly. "I'd sue you for breach o' promise myself ruther than lose what I come after."

"I don't doubt you're capable of it," Collier Pratt said, surveying her ruefully. "That certainly would ruin my reputation. But seriously, supposing I were to give my consent to Sheila's going back to Miss Martin—Sheila's fond of her, and I should be very glad to do Miss Martin a service—little as you may be inclined to believe it of me. I'm fond enough of the child, but she is a considerable embarrassment to a man situated as I am. Supposing I should consent to giving her up as you suggest, how can a woman situated as Miss Martin is situated undertake such a charge permanently? How could she afford it? What kind of a future should I be surrendering my little girl to? One has to think of those things. Miss Martin is a poor girl—"

"It's a lucky thing that you didn't know it before," Hitty said deliberately. "What you don't know that a woman's got, you wouldn't be trying to get away from her. Nancy's Uncle Elijah that died last year left her a million dollars in his will."

"The devil he did—"

"I guess if anybody's going to talk about devils it had better be me," Hitty said dryly. "Does the child go or stay?"

"Oh! she goes," Collier Pratt said. "I'm sorry you didn't come after me too, Hitty."

"Nobody from up our way is ever coming after you. You can put that in your pipe and smoke it. Put on your bonnet, Sheila."

"In some ways that is more of a relief than you know, Hitty. Some of the young men from up your way are so violent."

"It ain't generally known yet," Hitty said as a parting shot when, Sheila's hand in hers, she stood at the door preparatory to taking her triumphal departure. "But Nancy is going to marry considerable money in addition to what she's inherited."

Nancy finding it impossible to spend an hour of her time idly and with no appointments before noon that day, was engaged in darning a basket full of slum socks that she had brought home from the tenements to occupy Hitty's leisure moments. She was not very expert at this particular task, and the holes were so huge, and their method of behaving under scientific management so peculiar—it is hardly necessary to say that Nancy knew the theory of darning perfectly—that she was becoming more and more dissatisfied with her progress. Hitty's unprecedented and taciturn donning of her best bonnet in the early morning hours, followed by her abrupt departure without explanation or apology, was also a little disconcerting to any one acquainted with her habits. Nancy was relieved to hear her key in the lock again, and put down her work to greet her.

The door opened and Sheila stood on the threshold. Hitty was close behind her, but Nancy had eyes only for the child.

"Don't cry, Miss Dear," Sheila said, in her arms. "I cried hard every night when I was gone from you, but now I have come back. My father does not want me, and he says that you can have me."

"He signed a paper," Hitty said. "I've got it in my bag with my specs. If ever he shows his face around here we can have the law on him."

"Can I really have Sheila?" Nancy cried. "I can't believe that—her father would let her go. I can't understand it."

"He's a kind of a poor soul," Hitty said. "He ain't got no real contrivance. He's glad enough to get rid of her."

"Did he say so?"

"Well, nearabout. He has a high-falutin way of talking but that was the amount of it. He knows which side his bread is buttered. He ain't nobody's fool. I'll say that for him."

"I can't say that you make him out a very pleasant character," Nancy said. "But he's an artist, Hitty. Artists don't react to the same set of laws that we do. They're different somehow."

"They ain't so different, when it comes to that," Hitty said dryly. "They won't take a hint, but the harder you kick 'em the better for all concerned. Don't you go sticking up for that low-down loon. He ain't worth it."

"I suppose he isn't," Nancy said; "he's a pretty poor apology for a man as we understand men, Hitty, but there's something about him,—a power and a charm that you can't altogether discount, even though you have lost every particle of your respect for him."

"He has a kind of way," Hitty conceded, "but I ain't one o' them kind o' women that hankers much for the society of a man that's once shown himself to be more of a sneak than the average."

"I don't think that I am, either," Nancy said gravely.

"I want to be your little girl always," Sheila announced, "if I may talk now, may I? And Monsieur Dick's, too, and sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam, and feast upon strawberries, sugar and cream. I want to see Monsieur Dick. Where is he?"

"He's been sick," Nancy said, "but he's getting better now, I think. I haven't seen him for some time, myself."

"Don't you love him very much and aren't you very sorry?"

"He probably isn't very sick," Nancy said. "I don't think he could be—but if he were I should be sorry, of course."

"I don't want him to be sick," Sheila said, making herself a nest in Nancy's lap, and curling around in it like a kitten. "If he was I should be very, very unhappy, and I am tired of being unhappy, Miss Dear."

Nancy's arms closed tight about her little body, which was lighter in her arms than she had ever known it. "Oh! I'm going to make such a strong well, little girl of you," she cried, "and we're going to have so many pleasant times together. I'm tired of being unhappy, too, Sheila, dear."



CHAPTER XXI

LOHENGRIN AND WHITE SATIN

Dick, having la grippe, and doing his bewildered best to get pneumonia and gastritis by creeping out of bed when his temperature was highest, and indulging in untrammelled orgies of food and drink and exposure to draughts, had finally succeeded in making himself physically very miserable indeed. His mind had been out of joint for weeks. He reached the phase presently of refusing all nourishment and spiritual consolation, indiscriminately, and finding himself unbenefited by these heroic methods, decided in his own mind that all was over with him.

He knew nothing about sickness, having led a charmed life in that respect since the measles period, and the persistent misery in his interior, attacking lung and liver impartially,—to say nothing of the top of his head and the back of his neck, and as his weakness increased, his cardiac region where there was a perpetual palpitation, and the calves of his legs which set up an ache like that of a recalcitrant tooth,—persuaded him that such suffering as his must be a certain indication of the approaching end. He had dismissed his doctor after the first visit, and denying himself to visitors, found himself alone and apparently in a desperate condition, with no one to minister to him but paid dependents. It was then that the loss of Nancy began to assume spectral proportions. He had been so long accustomed to think of himself as the strong silent lover, equipped with the patience and understanding that would outlast all the vagaries of Nancy's adventurous tendencies, that it was difficult to readjust himself to a new conception of her as a woman that another and even less worthy man had so nearly won,—under his nose.

He had never thought much of his money until it began to acquire the virtue of an alkahest in his mind, an universal solvent that would transmute all the baser metals in Nancy's life and the lives of the people in whom Nancy was interested, into the pure gold of luxury and ease. He knew that the conventional fairy gifts would mean very little to her, but he had dreamed, when she was ready, of working out with her some practicable and gracious scheme of beneficence. There was one power she coveted that he could put in her hands,—one way that he could befriend and relieve her even before she conceded him that prerogative. When he learned that she had a fortune of her own his hopes came tumbling about his head, and he lay disconsolate among the ruins. His creeping physical disability seemed significant of the cataclysmic overthrow of all his dreams and desires. From having secretly and in some terror arrived at the conclusion that death was imminent, he began to look upon such a solution of his misery with some favor.

It was a very gaunt and hollow-eyed caricature of the Dick she had known that confronted Nancy, when instigated by Betty, who had his illness heavily on her mind, she forced her way unannounced into the curious Georgian living-room of the suite wherein he was incarcerated. He had been stretched in an attitude of abandon on the couch when she opened the oak paneled door, but he jumped to his feet in a spasm of rage and alarm when he discovered that he had a visitor.

"Go away," he said, "I am not able to see anybody. There's a mistake. I gave strict orders that nobody at all was to be admitted."

"I know, Dick," Nancy said gently, "don't blame your faithful servitors. I thought I should have to use a gun on them, but I explained to them that you must be looked after."

"I don't want to be looked after. I'm all right, thank you. Are you alone?"

"No, Hitty's outside. Betty simply insisted on my bringing her,—I don't know why, but she said you'd be kinder to me if I did. I don't think you're very kind."

A flicker of a smile crossed Dick's face, which seemed to say that if anything could bring back a momentary relish of existence the mention of Betty's name would be that thing. Nancy saw the expression and misinterpreted it.

"I don't want to see anybody," Dick repeated firmly. "Will you be good enough to go away and leave me to my misery?"

"No, I won't," Nancy said, "I never left anybody to their misery yet, and I'm not going to begin on you. Of course, if you'd rather see Betty, I'll send for her. She seems to know a good deal about your habits and customs. You look like a monk in that bathrobe. I'm glad you're not a fat man, Dick. It's so very hard to calculate just how much to cut down on starches and sweets without injury to the health. What are you feeding up on?"

"You know very well that I'm not feeding up on anything, but if you think you can come around here, and dope out one of your darned health menus for me, and sit around watching me eat it, you are jolly well mistaken. I wish you'd go home, Nancy. I don't like you to-day. I don't like myself or anybody in this whole universe. I'm not fit for human society—don't you see I'm not?"

"You're awful cross, dear."

"Don't call me dear. I'm not Sheila or one of your sick waitresses, you know."

"Sheila's back."

"Is she?"

"Don't you care?"

"Oh, I suppose so."

"She loves you."

"She's unique."

"You told me once there were other girls, Dick."

"They're all over it by now."

"Dick, can't I do something for you?"

"Yes, leave me alone."

"I've never seen you like this before."

"No, thank God."

"I didn't know you were ever anything but sort of smug and superior."

"Grand description."

"You ought to be in bed, dear—I didn't mean to call you dear, it slipped out, Dicky,—and taking nourishment every hour or so. What does the doctor say?"

"Nothing, he's given me up as a bad job."

"Given you up?"

"Yes, there's nothing he can do for me."

"Why, Dick, my dear, what is it?"

"Oh! lungs or liver or something. I don't know."

"What are you taking, Dick?"

"I tell you I can't take anything," he said, misunderstanding her. "It makes me sick to eat. Every time I try to eat anything I feel a lot worse for it."

"When did you try last?"

"Oh, yesterday some time. Now what in the name of sense makes a woman shed tears at a simple statement like that? I'm not in shape to stand this. Once and for all, Nancy, will you get out and leave me? I tell you I never wanted to see you less in my life. I'll write you a letter and apologize if you'll only go, now."

"Oh, I'll go," Nancy said. "I couldn't really believe that you wanted me to,—that's all."

She started for the door—but Dick, weakened by lack of food, tortured beyond his endurance by the sudden assault on his nerves made by Nancy's appearance, gave way to his relief at her going an instant too soon. Like a small boy in pain he crooked his elbow and covered his face with his arm.

Nancy ran to him and knelt at his side, taking his head on her breast.

"Dear," she said, "you do want me. We want each other. You love me, Dicky, and I am going to love you—if you'll only let me look after you and nurse you back to health again."

"I don't want to be nursed," Dick blubbered, his head buried in her bosom, "I want to look out for you, and take care of you, and—and now look at me. You'll never love me after this, Nancy."

"Yes, I shall, dear," Nancy said. "I've always loved you somehow. It'll—it'll be the saving of me, Dick."

"Well, then I do want to be nursed. I—I haven't cried before since I had the measles, Nancy."

"I'm glad you cried, now, then," Nancy said.

* * * * *

"I suppose you'll want to be married in the courtyard of the Inn," Dick said some weeks later, when they were conventionally ensconced in Nancy's own drawing-room; Hitty happily rattling silverware in the butler's pantry in the rear, "with old Triton blowing his wreathed horn above us, and all the nymphs and gargoyles and Hercules as interested spectators. Well, go as far as you like. I haven't any objection. I'll be married in a Roman bath if you want me to, and eat bran biscuit and hygienic apple sauce for my wedding breakfast."

"Betty and Preston are going to be married at the Inn," Nancy said; "you know her mother's an invalid, and they can't have it at home. Do you know what I'd like to give them as a wedding present?"

"I don't."

"Well, you know, Preston's firm has gone out of existence. The war simply killed it. They haven't much money ahead, and he may have a harder time than he thinks getting located again."

"Yes?"

"I thought I'd like to give them Outside Inn for a wedding present. Besides, I don't see what else there is to do with it. It's making several hundred a month, now, and promises to make more."

"Good idea," Dick said.

"You don't seem exceedingly interested."

"Oh, I am," Dick said, "I'm more interested in our wedding than Betty's wedding present, but that doesn't imply a lack of merit in your idea. You'll want to be married at the Inn, I take it?"

"You'd let me, wouldn't you?"

"Sure I'd let you. When a man marries a modern girl with all the trappings and the suits of modernity, he ought to be prepared to take the consequences cheerfully."

"Then I'm going to surprise you. I don't want anything modern at all about my wedding. I want it in church with a huge bridal bouquet and Lohengrin and white satin; Caroline for my matron of honor and Betty for my bridesmaid, and Sheila for flower girl. I want a wedding breakfast at the Ritz and rice and old shoes—just all the old traditional things."

"Gee whiz," Dick ejaculated, "is this straight, or are you only making it up to sound good to me? You can have it anyway you like it, you know."

"That's the way I like it," Nancy said. "It's good to be a modern girl, but I really prefer to be an old-fashioned wife—with reservations," she added hastily.

"That's what we all come to in the end," Dick said, "no matter how we feel or think we feel about it—being modern with reservations."

"I saw Collier Pratt to-day," Nancy said suddenly, as she watched a log split apart in the fireplace and scatter its tiny shower of sparks, "on the avenue."

Dick carefully stamped out two smoldering places on the rug before he answered.

"Did you?" he said.

"He had a cheap little creature with him, dark haired in messy cerise."

"It may have been his wife. I hear that she's living with him again."

"Is she?"

"Nancy," Dick said with an effort, after a few minutes of silence, "are you all over that? Is it really fair and right of me to take you? I've been puzzling over that lately. I want you on any terms, you know, as far as I am concerned, but I'm a sort of monogamist. If a woman has once cared for a person, no matter who or what that person is, can she ever care again in the same way for any one? Isn't it pity you feel for me, after all?"

"No it isn't pity," Nancy said slowly. "I cared for that man until I found that he was the shadow and not the substance. He isn't fit to black your shoes, Dick.—Besides—if—if it was pity," she added irrelevantly, "that's the way to get me started, you know."

"If I only have got you started—really."

Nancy crossed the two feet of space between them and sank at his feet, leaning her head back against his knee while he stroked her hair silently.

"There's one way of proving," she said presently, "if—if you've made a woman really care for you. I should think you'd know that. I told you how you'd made me feel about the bridal bouquet and Lohengrin."

"Does that prove something?"

"Doesn't it?"

"I suppose it does. You mean it proves that a woman truly loves a man if he's made her feel that she wants to be an old-fashioned wife—"

"And mother, Dick," Nancy finished for him bravely.

THE END