It was thoroughly characteristic of Nancy to turn her back on the most significant facts of her experience, and occupy herself exclusively with its by-products. She refused to consider herself as an heiress entitled to spend money lavishly for her own uses, but she squandered it on her pet enterprise. She dismissed the idea that Dick, whom she neglected to discourage as decisively as her growing interest in another man would seem to warrant, had bought a country estate for the sole purpose of ensconcing her there as mistress. She dreamed of Collier Pratt and his ideal of her, and presented herself punctually at his studio as a model for that ideal, while ignoring absolutely the fact that he was nearly a hundred dollars in debt to her for meals served at Outside Inn. She had sufficient logic and common sense to apply to these matters, and sufficient imagination to handle them sympathetically, had she chosen to consider them at all, but she did not 199 choose. She was deep in the adventure of her existence as differentiated from its practical working out.

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

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

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

“The place I always go when I’ve finished a picture is a little 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.

But after her work for the day was done, and 201 she was back in her own apartment with Sheila tucked snugly in bed, and Hitty out for the night with a sick friend, there came the touch on her bell that she knew was Collier Pratt’s; and she opened the door to find him standing on her threshold.

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

“I wasn’t sure I would,” Collier Pratt said, “but I did, you see.”

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

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

She led the way into her drawing-room.

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

“Is that better?” she asked.

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

“No, this is better,” he said.

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

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

“I didn’t realize that this would be the first time,” he said.

“There couldn’t have been any other time,” Nancy breathed, “you know that.”

“I didn’t know,” Collier Pratt said thoughtfully. “Oh! you little American girls, with 203 your strange, straight-laced little bodies and your fearless souls!”

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

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

“You wonder woman,” he murmured again.

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

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

“It’s Sheila,” Nancy said, “she has those little nightmares and falls out of bed.”

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

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

“I do not,” Collier Pratt said with unnecessary emphasis.

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

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

“I hadn’t,” Nancy said happily.

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

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

“She doesn’t have nightmares often now,” Nancy said with stiffening lips. “She used to 205 have them almost every night, but by watching her diet carefully we have practically eliminated them.”

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

“She loves Sheila, she—she’d do anything for her.”

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s the best work I’ve ever done,” he said.

“I don’t look like it now, do I?”

He held her off to see.

“No, by jove, you don’t. It’s gone, now—just that thing I painted.”

“How do I look now?”

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

“I’m glad.”

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

“Is—that flattering?”

“Supremely.”

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

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

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

“Please God.”

“It would be wonderful, wouldn’t it, if my picture did make you famous!”

“I think it will.”

“I’m nothing but a grubby little working girl, and you’re a great artist,—and you love me.”

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

“In the picture?” Nancy said. “I love you. I love you. That wasn’t in the picture—I kept it out.”

“I won’t marry him until he is ready for me,” she said to herself at one time during the night. She lay perfectly quiet till morning, her hands folded upon her breast, and her little girl pig-tails pulled down on either side of the coverlet, wide-eyed and tranquil. She could not bear to sleep and forget for a moment the beautiful thing that had happened to her between dawn and dawn. “I’ll take care of him and Sheila, and nourish him, and help him to sell my picture. It isn’t every woman who would understand 208 his kind of loving, but I understand it.”

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

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

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

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