. He was wearing
a smutty painter's smock, and though his face was shining with soap
and water, his hair was standing about his face in a disorder eloquent
of at least a dozen hours' neglect. Sheila, in a mussy gingham dress,
was trying to pry off the pasteboard covering of a pint bottle of milk
with a pair of scissors, and succeeding only indifferently. They both
turned on Hitty's entrance, and the milk bottle went crashing to the
floor when the little girl recognized her friend, but after one
terrified look at her father she made no move at all in Hitty's
direction.

"And to what," Collier Pratt ejaculated slowly and disagreeably, as is
any man's wont before he has had his draught of breakfast coffee, "am
I to attribute the pleasure of this visit?"

"It ain't no pleasure to me," Hitty said, advancing, a figure of
menace, into the center of the dusty workshop, strangely uncouth and
unprepossessing in the cold morning light,--"and if it's any pleasure
to you, that's an effect that I ain't calculated to produce. I've come
here on business--the business of collecting that poor neglected child
there, and taking her back where she belongs, where there's folks that
knows enough to treat her right."

"Another of Miss Martin's friends and well-wishers, I take it. These
American girls are given to surrounding themselves with groups of warm
and impulsive associates. Do you by any chance happen to know a young
lawyer by the name of Boynton, Hitty? A collection lawyer?"

"I'll thank you to call me Mrs. Spinney, if you please, or if you
don't please. Mrs. Spinney is the name I go by when I'm spoken to by
them that knows their manners. If Billy Boynton thinks he can collect
blood out of a stone he's welcome to try, but I should think he was
too long headed to waste his time."

"I gave him my I. O. U.," Collier Pratt said wearily. "If you don't
mind, Hitty,--I really must be excused from your inexcusable
surname--I am going to drink a cup of coffee before we continue this
interesting discussion--_cafe noir_, our late unfortunate accident
depriving me of _cafe au lait_ as usual. Sheila, get the cups."

"You don't mean to say that you feed that peaked child with full
strength coffee, do you? It'll stunt her growth; ain't you got the
sense to know that?"

"I don't like _big_ women," Collier Pratt said. "She's very fond of
coffee."

"Well! I've come to get her and take her away where you won't be in a
position to stunt her gro