or and Betty
for my bridesmaid, and Sheila for flower girl. I want a wedding
breakfast at the Ritz and rice and old shoes--just all the old
traditional things."

"Gee whiz," Dick ejaculated, "is this straight, or are you only making
it up to sound good to me? You can have it anyway you like it, you
know."

"That's the way I like it," Nancy said. "It's good to be a modern
girl, but I really prefer to be an old-fashioned wife--with
reservations," she added hastily.

"That's what we all come to in the end," Dick said, "no matter how we
feel or think we feel about it--being modern with reservations."

"I saw Collier Pratt to-day," Nancy said suddenly, as she watched a
log split apart in the fireplace and scatter its tiny shower of
sparks, "on the avenue."

Dick carefully stamped out two smoldering places on the rug before he
answered.

"Did you?" he said.

"He had a cheap little creature with him, dark haired in messy
cerise."

"It may have been his wife. I hear that she's living with him again."

"Is she?"

"Nancy," Dick said with an effort, after a few minutes of silence,
"are you all over that? Is it really fair and right of me to take you?
I've been puzzling over that lately. I want you on any terms, you
know, as far as I am concerned, but I'm a sort of monogamist. If a
woman has once cared for a person, no matter who or what that person
is, can she ever care again in the same way for any one? Isn't it pity
you feel for me, after all?"

"No it isn't pity," Nancy said slowly. "I cared for that man until I
found that he was the shadow and not the substance. He isn't fit to
black your shoes, Dick.--Besides--if--if it was pity," she added
irrelevantly, "that's the way to get me started, you know."

"If I only have got you started--really."

Nancy crossed the two feet of space between them and sank at his feet,
leaning her head back against his knee while he stroked her hair
silently.

"There's one way of proving," she said presently, "if--if you've made
a woman really care for you. I should think you'd know that. I told
you how you'd made me feel about the bridal bouquet and _Lohengrin_."

"Does that prove something?"

"Doesn't it?"

"I suppose it does. You mean it proves that a woman truly loves a man
if he's made her feel that she wants to be an old-fashioned wife--"

"And mother, Dick," Nancy finished for him bravely.

THE END

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Outside Inn, by Eth