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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And what did you say?” Nancy asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“We were all making jokes, Miss Dear,” Sheila explained.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What shall I wear?”

“What have you got on?”

“That blue crêpe, made surplice,—the one you liked the other night.”

“That’s just what I want—Madonna blue. Can you get down here in fifteen minutes?”

“Yes, I’ll send Michael up-town with Sheila.”

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

“They’re wonderful!” she gasped, but “You’re wonderful” were the words she stifled on her lips.

He painted till the light failed him.

“Yes,” Nancy said, “it’s—it’s come.”

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

“Well, here I am,” said Nancy faintly.

“Yes, here you are,” Collier Pratt responded out of the fervor of his artist’s absorption.

“It’s rather a personal matter to me,” Nancy ventured some seconds later.

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

“Like a flower in a vase,” he said; “to me you’re a wonderful creature.”

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

“But, good God! I don’t look at you impersonally.”

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

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

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

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

“You’re afraid you’ll disturb the—what you want to paint,” she said accusingly.

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

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

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

“I can’t to-night,” Caroline said, “I promised Nancy to dine at the Inn.”

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

“I regard an engagement with Nancy as just as sacred as—”

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

“I don’t like doing that,” Caroline said; “it’s a nice night for a bat, though.”

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

“We’d have to telephone Nancy,” Caroline hesitated.

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

“I’d rather hear what you say,” she said.

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

“Madison Square 3403 doesn’t answer,” Central informed him crisply after an interval.

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

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

“That’s nice of you,” Billy responded heartily. “I thought you’d say that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re a kind of ridiculous boy.”

“Don’t you like me a little bit?”

“Yes, a little.”

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

“Ought not to be engaged to you. That’s one of the things I want to talk to you about.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That isn’t what I’m shaking with joy about.”

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

“Just about,” Billy agreed cheerfully.

Caroline turned large reproachful eyes on him.

“Billy, how can you?”

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

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

“No, I don’t,” said Billy.

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

“Let’s go right in here,” Billy said, guiding her by the arm through the door of the grill of the Café des Artistes which she was ignoring in her absorption.

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

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

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

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

“Is that what you think?”

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

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

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

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

“Likes him?” Billy suggested.

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

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

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

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

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.

“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 fiancée, 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.

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.

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.

“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, crême renversé, he makes—deliciously good, and we give it to the clerking girls.”

“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 likes petit pois avec laitue too and haricot coupé, 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’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.

“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 aimée.”

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 aimée,” 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.

“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.