on a
large scale,--she had a child to care for, and she felt that she had
entirely disproved any lingering feeling in the mind of any one
associated with her that she ought to marry,--at least that she ought
to marry Dick.

No woman ought to marry for the sake of marrying, but she was growing
to understand now that the experiences of love and marriage might be
necessary to the true development of a woman like herself; that there
might even be some tragedy in missing them. She was twenty-five,
practically alone in the world, and the growing passion of her life
was for a child that she had borrowed, and might be constrained to
relinquish at any moment.

She was tired. The unaccustomed confinement of the long hours at the
Inn, the strain of enduring the thick, almost unalleviated heat of an
exceptionally humid New York summer, and the tension engendered by her
various executive responsibilities, all told on her physically, and
her physical condition in its turn reacted on her mind, till she was
conscious of a nostalgia,--a yearning and a hunger for something that
she could not understand or name, but that was none the less
irresistible. She fell into strange moods of brooding and lassitude;
but there were two connections in which her spirit and ambition never
failed her. She never failed of interest in the distribution of food
values to her unconscious patrons, and incidentally to Collier Pratt,
or in directing the activities and diversions of Sheila.

She bathed and dressed the child with her own hands every morning,
combed out the cloudy black hair, fine spun and wavy, that framed the
delicate face, and accentuated the dazzling white and pink of her
coloring. She had bought her a complete new wardrobe--she was spending
money freely now on every one but herself--venturing on one dress at a
time in fear and trepidation lest Collier Pratt should suddenly call
her to account for her interference with his rights as a parent, but
he seemed entirely oblivious of the fact that Sheila had changed her
shabby studio black for the most cobwebby of muslins and linens,
frocks that by virtue of their exquisite fineness cost Nancy
considerably more than her own.

"I say to my father, 'See the pretty new gown that Miss Dear bought
for me,' and my father says to me, 'Comb your hair straight back from
your brow, and don't let your arms dangle from your shoulders.'"
Sheila complained, "He sees so hard the little things that nobody
see