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

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

She took each creaking stair with a snort of disgust, and reaching the battered door with 289 Collier Pratt’s visiting card tacked on the smeary panel on a level with her eye, she knocked sharply, and scorning to wait for a reply, turned the knob and walked in.

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

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

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

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

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

“I gave him my I. O. U.,” Collier Pratt said wearily. “If you don’t mind, Hitty,—I really 291 must be excused from your inexcusable surname—I am going to drink a cup of coffee before we continue this interesting discussion—cafÉ noir, our late unfortunate accident depriving me of cafÉ au lait as usual. Sheila, get the cups.”

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

“I don’t like big women,” Collier Pratt said. “She’s very fond of coffee.”

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

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

“I should spread a newspaper down if I was 292 you,” Hitty said, “before I et my vittles off a table that way. If a table ain’t scrubbed as often as twice a day it ain’t fit to be et off.”

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

“Nobody had to send me. Wild horses wouldn’t have kept me away from here.”

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

“I don’t think you would. I know you’re a-goin’ to.”

“Indeed.”

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

“There’s a great deal in what you say, Hitty.”

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

“What would you suggest my doing about the child’s mother? She has a mother living, you know.”

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

“Well, don’t send any more of them, Hitty,” Collier Pratt protested. “My work won’t stand it.”

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

“What do you propose doing to me if I don’t?”

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

“I don’t see how you could use anything you’ve got.”

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

“I don’t doubt you’re capable of it,” Collier 294 Pratt said, surveying her ruefully. “That certainly would ruin my reputation. But seriously, supposing I were to give my consent to Sheila’s going back to Miss Martin—Sheila’s fond of her, and I should be very glad to do Miss Martin a service—little as you may be inclined to believe it of me. I’m fond enough of the child, but she is a considerable embarrassment to a man situated as I am. Supposing I should consent to giving her up as you suggest, how can a woman situated as Miss Martin is situated undertake such a charge permanently? How could she afford it? What kind of a future should I be surrendering my little girl to? One has to think of those things. Miss Martin is a poor girl—”

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

“The devil he did—”

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

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

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

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

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

Nancy finding it impossible to spend an hour of her time idly and with no appointments before noon that day, was engaged in darning a basket full of slum socks that she had brought home from the tenements to occupy Hitty’s leisure moments. She was not very expert at this particular task, and the holes were so huge, and their method of behaving under scientific management so peculiar—it is hardly necessary to say that Nancy knew the theory of darning perfectly—that she was becoming more and more dissatisfied with her progress. Hitty’s 296 unprecedented and taciturn donning of her best bonnet in the early morning hours, followed by her abrupt departure without explanation or apology, was also a little disconcerting to any one acquainted with her habits. Nancy was relieved to hear her key in the lock again, and put down her work to greet her.

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

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

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

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

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

“Did he say so?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t think that I am, either,” Nancy said gravely.

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

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

“Don’t you love him very much and aren’t you very sorry?”

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

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

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