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

“I didn’t understand that your mother was living, Sheila,” she said.

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

“Did she live with you in Paris?”

“Only sometimes.”

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

“She just isn’t very nice,” Sheila repeated. “She is histérique; she pounded me with her hands, and hurt me.”

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

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

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

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

“You always said that Sheila was motherless,” Nancy said.

“It is simpler than stating that she is worse than motherless.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were married?”

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

“Surely,” Nancy said, “you know it isn’t—like that.”

“What is it like then?”

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

“It can’t be that you believe you have been—fair with me,” she faltered.

“I don’t think I have been unfair,” he said, “I have made no protestations, you know.”

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

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

“It wasn’t exactly consecrated.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You love,” Nancy cried, “you love?”

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

“I don’t like your way, then,” Nancy said wearily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your child?” Nancy cried aghast. “You wouldn’t take Sheila away from me.”

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

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

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

“I ask for her now.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes, dear,” Nancy said. “Good-by.”

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

“We part more in anger than in sorrow,” he said.

“Oh! Go,” Nancy cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Coming,” Dick reassured her.

“Has anybody heard from her?” Betty asked.

“Michael has, I think.”

“You aren’t worried about her, are you?” Caroline asked.

“Yes, I am,” Betty said.

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

“You wait till you see her, you’ll be worried about her, too.”

“What’s wrong?” Dick asked quickly.

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

“The devil he has.”

There was a step on the rickety stair.

“Hush! There she is now,” Caroline cried.

“No,” Betty said quietly, listening. “That’s not Nancy. That’s your brother, Caroline.”

“I haven’t heard his step for such a long time I’ve forgotten it,” Billy said.

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

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

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

“Hello, everybody,” Preston Eustace said as Michael held the door for him. “How’s everything, Caroline?”

“All right,” Caroline said. Then she added unnecessarily, “You—you know Betty, don’t you?”

“I used to know Betty,” he said slowly.

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

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

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

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

“Well, I see through them, so it’s all right. What’s this about Nancy?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Betty said; “there she comes now.”

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

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

“I’ll send you some geraniums to-morrow.”

“Don’t,” she said. “How do you do, Preston?”

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

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

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

“I’ll tell you later,” she promised him again.

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

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

“Flounder a la Française 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.”

“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.

“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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

“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.

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?”

“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.

“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 mêlée 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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

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.”