--do you
know him, Nancy? Lived in Paris always till the war. He'll appreciate
Ritz cooking at Riggs' prices if anybody will."

Nancy looked fixedly at the small side-table where the stranger had
just placed himself as if he were etched upon the whiteness of the
wall behind him. He sat erect and brooding,--his dark, rather
melancholy eyes staring straight ahead, and a slight frown wrinkling
his really fine forehead. He wore an Inverness cape slung over one
shoulder.

"Looks like one of Rembrandt's portraits of himself," Caroline
suggested.

"He looks like a brigand," Betty said. "Nancy's struck dumb with the
privilege of adding fuel to a flame of genius like that. Wake up and
eat your peach Melba, Nancy."

Nancy started, and took perfunctorily the spoon that Molly was holding
out to her, which she forgot to lift to her lips even after it was
freighted with its first delicious mouthful.

"I dreamed about that man," she said.

CHAPTER IV

CINDERELLA

Nancy shut the door of her apartment behind her, and slipped out into
the dimly lit corridor. From her sitting-room came a burst of
concerted laughter, the sound of Betty's sweet, high pitched voice
raised in sudden protest, and then the echo of some sort of a physical
struggle; and Caroline took the piano and began to improvise.

"They won't miss me," Nancy said to herself, "I must have air." She
drew a long breath with a hand against her breast, apparently to
relieve the pressure there. "I can't stay shut up in a _room_," she
kept repeating as if she were stating the most reasonable of premises,
and turning, fled down the two flights of stairs that led to the
outside door of the building.

The breath of the night was refreshingly cool upon her hot cheeks, and
she smiled into the darkness gratefully. Across the way a row of
brownstone houses, implacably boarded up for the summer, presented
dull and dimly defined surfaces that reflected nothing, not even the
lights of the street, or the shadow of a passing straggler. Nancy
turned her face toward the avenue. The nostalgia that was her
inheritance from her father, and through him from a long line of
ancestors that followed the sea whither it might lead them, was upon
her this night, although she did not understand it as such. She only
thought vaguely of a strip of white beach with a whiter moon hung high
above it, and the long silver line of the tide,--drawing out.

"I wish I had a hat on," she said. The