ink so?" Billy inquired presently as Dick did not
answer.

"Think what?"

"That Betty's a queer sort of girl."

Dick took his pipe out of his pocket and began stuffing it full of
tobacco. When this was satisfactorily accomplished, he struck a match
on his boot heel, and lit the mixture, drawing at it critically
meanwhile.

"Damn' queer," he admitted, between puffs.

CHAPTER XV

CLOUDS OF GLORY

Nancy, trailing clouds of glory, took up the management of her Inn
with renewed vigor. She had found her touchstone. The flower of love,
which she had scarcely understood to be indigenous to the soil of her
own practical little garden, had suddenly lifted up its head there in
fragrant, radiant bloom. She was so happy that she was impatient of
all the inadequate, inefficient manipulation of affairs in the whole
world. She felt strong and wise to put everything right in a neglected
universe.

She loved. She was satisfied to live in that love for the present,
with no imagination of the future except as her lover should construct
it for her; and in him she had absolute faith. The things that he had
said or left unsaid had no significance to her. Before she had dreamed
of a personal relation with him he had singled her out as a creature
made for the consummation and fulfilment of the greatest passion of
all. The merest suspicion that there had been a man in the world who
could have frustrated this beautiful potentiality in her had moved him
profoundly. There was nothing in her experience to help her to
differentiate between the sensibility of the artistic temperament and
the manifestations of the more reliable emotions. The presence in the
human breast of a fire that gave out light and not heat was a
condition undreamed of in her philosophy. To doubt Collier Pratt's
love for her in the face of his tacit pursuit of her, and the
acceptance of the obligation she had chosen to put him under, would
have seemed to her the rankest kind of heresy.

She had been brought up on terms of comradely equality with boys and
men, and she understood the rules of all the pretty games of fluffing
and light flirtation that young men and women play with each other,
but serious love-making--that was a thing apart. In the world of honor
and fair dealing a man took a woman's kiss of surrender for one reason
and one reason only----that she was his woman, and he so held her in
his heart.

Now that she was in this sort committed to her lov