duce some vaudeville impresario to permit her to spend
fifteen minutes twice or four times daily, singing old-fashioned songs
to the proletariat at something better than a living wage. She had an
idea for a turn to be entitled, "Songs of the 'Sixties."

The arrival of Andrew Daney with twenty-five hundred dollars might
have been likened to an eleventh-hour reprieve for a condemned
murderer. Twenty-five hundred dollars! Why, she and Don could live two
years on that! She was free--at last! The knowledge exalted her--in
the reaction from a week of contemplating a drab, barren future, she
gave no thought to the extreme unlikelihood of anyone's daring to
steal a forty-foot motor-boat on a coast where harbors are so few and
far between as they are on the Pacific. Had old Caleb been alive, he
would have informed her that such action was analogous to the theft of
a hot stove, and that no business man possessed of a grain of common
sense would have hastened to reimburse her for the loss after an
inconsequential search of only two days. Had she been more worldly
wise, she would have known that business men do not part with
twenty-five hundred dollars that readily--otherwise, they would not be
business men and would not be possessed of twenty-five hundred
dollars. Nan only realized that, in handing her a roll of bank-notes
with a rubber band round them, Andrew Daney had figuratively given her
the key to her prison, against the bars of which her soul had beaten
for three long years.

Now, it is doubtful whether any woman ever loved a man without feeling
fully assured that she, more than any other person, was better
equipped to decide exactly what was best for that man. Her woman's
intuition told Nan that Donald McKaye was not to be depended upon to
conserve the honor of the McKaye family by refraining from considering
an alliance with her. Also, knowing full well the passionate yearnings
of her own heart and the weakness of her economic position, she shrank
from submitting herself to the task of repelling his advances. Where
he was concerned, she feared her own weakness--she, who had endured
the brutality of the world, could not endure that the world's
brutality should be visited upon him because of his love for her.
Strong of will, self-reliant, a born fighter, and as stiff-necked as
his father, his yearning to possess her, coupled with his instinct for
fair play, might and probably would lead him to tell the world to go
hang, t