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 café 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 garçon 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 Café 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.

“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.”

“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.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.

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 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.

“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?”

“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 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 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?”

“What would you call it?” Nancy asked.

“California fruit nut bread, or something like that, and call the custards crême renversé, 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.”

“This dinner is good,” he said reflectively, “like French home cooking. I haven’t had a real ragoût 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 café 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.”

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-Prés 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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

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.

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.”

“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.”

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.

“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.”

“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.

“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.