Dick, having la grippe, and doing his bewildered best to get pneumonia and gastritis by creeping out of bed when his temperature was highest, and indulging in untrammelled orgies of food and drink and exposure to draughts, had finally succeeded in making himself physically very miserable indeed. His mind had been out of joint for weeks. He reached the phase presently of refusing all nourishment and spiritual consolation, indiscriminately, and finding himself unbenefited by these heroic methods, decided in his own mind that all was over with him.

He knew nothing about sickness, having led a charmed life in that respect since the measles period, and the persistent misery in his interior, attacking lung and liver impartially,—to say nothing of the top of his head and the back of his neck, and as his weakness increased, his cardiac region where there was a perpetual palpitation, and the calves of his legs which set 300 up an ache like that of a recalcitrant tooth,—persuaded him that such suffering as his must be a certain indication of the approaching end. He had dismissed his doctor after the first visit, and denying himself to visitors, found himself alone and apparently in a desperate condition, with no one to minister to him but paid dependents. It was then that the loss of Nancy began to assume spectral proportions. He had been so long accustomed to think of himself as the strong silent lover, equipped with the patience and understanding that would outlast all the vagaries of Nancy’s adventurous tendencies, that it was difficult to readjust himself to a new conception of her as a woman that another and even less worthy man had so nearly won,—under his nose.

He had never thought much of his money until it began to acquire the virtue of an alkahest in his mind, an universal solvent that would transmute all the baser metals in Nancy’s life and the lives of the people in whom Nancy was interested, into the pure gold of luxury and ease. He knew that the conventional fairy gifts would mean very little to her, but he had dreamed, when she was ready, of working out with 301 her some practicable and gracious scheme of beneficence. There was one power she coveted that he could put in her hands,—one way that he could befriend and relieve her even before she conceded him that prerogative. When he learned that she had a fortune of her own his hopes came tumbling about his head, and he lay disconsolate among the ruins. His creeping physical disability seemed significant of the cataclysmic overthrow of all his dreams and desires. From having secretly and in some terror arrived at the conclusion that death was imminent, he began to look upon such a solution of his misery with some favor.

It was a very gaunt and hollow-eyed caricature of the Dick she had known that confronted Nancy, when instigated by Betty, who had his illness heavily on her mind, she forced her way unannounced into the curious Georgian living-room of the suite wherein he was incarcerated. He had been stretched in an attitude of abandon on the couch when she opened the oak paneled door, but he jumped to his feet in a spasm of rage and alarm when he discovered that he had a visitor.

“Go away,” he said, “I am not able to see 302 anybody. There’s a mistake. I gave strict orders that nobody at all was to be admitted.”

“I know, Dick,” Nancy said gently, “don’t blame your faithful servitors. I thought I should have to use a gun on them, but I explained to them that you must be looked after.”

“I don’t want to be looked after. I’m all right, thank you. Are you alone?”

“No, Hitty’s outside. Betty simply insisted on my bringing her,—I don’t know why, but she said you’d be kinder to me if I did. I don’t think you’re very kind.”

A flicker of a smile crossed Dick’s face, which seemed to say that if anything could bring back a momentary relish of existence the mention of Betty’s name would be that thing. Nancy saw the expression and misinterpreted it.

“I don’t want to see anybody,” Dick repeated firmly. “Will you be good enough to go away and leave me to my misery?”

“No, I won’t,” Nancy said, “I never left anybody to their misery yet, and I’m not going to begin on you. Of course, if you’d rather see Betty, I’ll send for her. She seems to know a good deal about your habits and customs. You look like a monk in that bathrobe. I’m glad 303 you’re not a fat man, Dick. It’s so very hard to calculate just how much to cut down on starches and sweets without injury to the health. What are you feeding up on?”

“You know very well that I’m not feeding up on anything, but if you think you can come around here, and dope out one of your darned health menus for me, and sit around watching me eat it, you are jolly well mistaken. I wish you’d go home, Nancy. I don’t like you to-day. I don’t like myself or anybody in this whole universe. I’m not fit for human society—don’t you see I’m not?”

“You’re awful cross, dear.”

“Don’t call me dear. I’m not Sheila or one of your sick waitresses, you know.”

“Sheila’s back.”

“Is she?”

“Don’t you care?”

“Oh, I suppose so.”

“She loves you.”

“She’s unique.”

“You told me once there were other girls, Dick.”

“They’re all over it by now.”

“Dick, can’t I do something for you?”

“Yes, leave me alone.”

“I’ve never seen you like this before.”

“No, thank God.”

“I didn’t know you were ever anything but sort of smug and superior.”

“Grand description.”

“You ought to be in bed, dear—I didn’t mean to call you dear, it slipped out, Dicky,—and taking nourishment every hour or so. What does the doctor say?”

“Nothing, he’s given me up as a bad job.”

“Given you up?”

“Yes, there’s nothing he can do for me.”

“Why, Dick, my dear, what is it?”

“Oh! lungs or liver or something. I don’t know.”

“What are you taking, Dick?”

“I tell you I can’t take anything,” he said, misunderstanding her. “It makes me sick to eat. Every time I try to eat anything I feel a lot worse for it.”

“When did you try last?”

“Oh, yesterday some time. Now what in the name of sense makes a woman shed tears at a simple statement like that? I’m not in shape 305 to stand this. Once and for all, Nancy, will you get out and leave me? I tell you I never wanted to see you less in my life. I’ll write you a letter and apologize if you’ll only go, now.”

“Oh, I’ll go,” Nancy said. “I couldn’t really believe that you wanted me to,—that’s all.”

She started for the door—but Dick, weakened by lack of food, tortured beyond his endurance by the sudden assault on his nerves made by Nancy’s appearance, gave way to his relief at her going an instant too soon. Like a small boy in pain he crooked his elbow and covered his face with his arm.

Nancy ran to him and knelt at his side, taking his head on her breast.

“Dear,” she said, “you do want me. We want each other. You love me, Dicky, and I am going to love you—if you’ll only let me look after you and nurse you back to health again.”

“I don’t want to be nursed,” Dick blubbered, his head buried in her bosom, “I want to look out for you, and take care of you, and—and now look at me. You’ll never love me after this, Nancy.”

“Yes, I shall, dear,” Nancy said. “I’ve always loved you somehow. It’ll—it’ll be the saving of me, Dick.”

“Well, then I do want to be nursed. I—I haven’t cried before since I had the measles, Nancy.”

“I’m glad you cried, now, then,” Nancy said.

“I suppose you’ll want to be married in the courtyard of the Inn,” Dick said some weeks later, when they were conventionally ensconced in Nancy’s own drawing-room; Hitty happily rattling silverware in the butler’s pantry in the rear, “with old Triton blowing his wreathed horn above us, and all the nymphs and gargoyles and Hercules as interested spectators. Well, go as far as you like. I haven’t any objection. I’ll be married in a Roman bath if you want me to, and eat bran biscuit and hygienic apple sauce for my wedding breakfast.”

“Betty and Preston are going to be married at the Inn,” Nancy said; “you know her mother’s an invalid, and they can’t have it at home. Do you know what I’d like to give them as a wedding present?”

“I don’t.”

“Well, you know, Preston’s firm has gone out of existence. The war simply killed it. They haven’t much money ahead, and he may have a harder time than he thinks getting located again.”

“Yes?”

“I thought I’d like to give them Outside Inn for a wedding present. Besides, I don’t see what else there is to do with it. It’s making several hundred a month, now, and promises to make more.”

“Good idea,” Dick said.

“You don’t seem exceedingly interested.”

“Oh, I am,” Dick said, “I’m more interested in our wedding than Betty’s wedding present, but that doesn’t imply a lack of merit in your idea. You’ll want to be married at the Inn, I take it?”

“You’d let me, wouldn’t you?”

“Sure I’d let you. When a man marries a modern girl with all the trappings and the suits of modernity, he ought to be prepared to take the consequences cheerfully.”

“Then I’m going to surprise you. I don’t want anything modern at all about my wedding. I want it in church with a huge bridal bouquet 308 and Lohengrin and white satin; Caroline for my matron of honor and Betty for my bridesmaid, and Sheila for flower girl. I want a wedding breakfast at the Ritz and rice and old shoes—just all the old traditional things.”

“Gee whiz,” Dick ejaculated, “is this straight, or are you only making it up to sound good to me? You can have it anyway you like it, you know.”

“That’s the way I like it,” Nancy said. “It’s good to be a modern girl, but I really prefer to be an old-fashioned wife—with reservations,” she added hastily.

“That’s what we all come to in the end,” Dick said, “no matter how we feel or think we feel about it—being modern with reservations.”

“I saw Collier Pratt to-day,” Nancy said suddenly, as she watched a log split apart in the fireplace and scatter its tiny shower of sparks, “on the avenue.”

Dick carefully stamped out two smoldering places on the rug before he answered.

“Did you?” he said.

“He had a cheap little creature with him, dark haired in messy cerise.”

“It may have been his wife. I hear that she’s living with him again.”

“Is she?”

“Nancy,” Dick said with an effort, after a few minutes of silence, “are you all over that? Is it really fair and right of me to take you? I’ve been puzzling over that lately. I want you on any terms, you know, as far as I am concerned, but I’m a sort of monogamist. If a woman has once cared for a person, no matter who or what that person is, can she ever care again in the same way for any one? Isn’t it pity you feel for me, after all?”

“No it isn’t pity,” Nancy said slowly. “I cared for that man until I found that he was the shadow and not the substance. He isn’t fit to black your shoes, Dick.—Besides—if—if it was pity,” she added irrelevantly, “that’s the way to get me started, you know.”

“If I only have got you started—really.”

Nancy crossed the two feet of space between them and sank at his feet, leaning her head back against his knee while he stroked her hair silently.

“There’s one way of proving,” she said presently, “if—if you’ve made a woman really care 310 for you. I should think you’d know that. I told you how you’d made me feel about the bridal bouquet and Lohengrin.”

“Does that prove something?”

“Doesn’t it?”

“I suppose it does. You mean it proves that a woman truly loves a man if he’s made her feel that she wants to be an old-fashioned wife—”

“And mother, Dick,” Nancy finished for him bravely.

THE END