ew friend becoming ironical on her own account.
Then she added seriously, "It's Hitty, you know, that will have all
the real care of Sheila. I'm pretty busy down here, and I--" she
hesitated, half expecting him to threaten to remove his child at once
from the prospective guardianship of a creature who reverted so
readily to the barbarism of ham and eggs.

"Well, if it's Hitty that is to have the care of Sheila," Collier
Pratt said, and Nancy was not longer puzzled as to which element of
her parentage Sheila owed her Irish complexion, "why, more power to
her!"

Nancy dreamed that night that she was married to Dick, and that Hitty
made and served them _pate de foies gras_ dumplings, while Collier
Pratt in freckles and overalls sat in a high chair, and had his dinner
with the family. Later it was discovered that Betty had poisoned his
bread and milk, and he died in Nancy's arms in dreadful agony,
swearing in a beautiful Irish brogue that in all his life he had never
looked at another woman,--which even in her dream seemed to Nancy a
somewhat irreconcilable statement.

CHAPTER X

THE PORTRAIT

To Nancy's surprise Hitty welcomed the little girl warmly, when she
was introduced into the family circle. She liked to be busy all day,
and her duties in taking care of Nancy were not onerous enough to keep
her full energy employed. She liked children and family life, and she
seemed to have the feeling that if Nancy continued to assemble the
various parts that go to make up a family, she would end by adding to
it the essential masculine element, though it was Dick and not Collier
Pratt that she visualized at the head of the table cutting up Sheila's
meat for her. Collier Pratt was to her a necessary but insignificant
detail in Nancy's scheme of things, a poor artist who had "frittered
away so much time in furrin parts" that he was incapable of supporting
his only child--"poor little motherless lamb!"--in anything like a
befitting and adequate manner. Whenever he came to see Sheila she
treated him with the condescension of a poor relation, and served his
tea in the second best china with the kitchen silver and linen, unless
Nancy caught her at it in time to demand the best.

Nancy had expected that Collier Pratt would try to make some business
arrangement with her when she took Sheila in charge,--that he would
insist on paying her at least a nominal sum a week for the child's
board. She had lain awake nights planning t