have--ahem--our little times
over _trifles_, darling, mere _trifles _" and Mrs. Ellicott takes a
pinch of air between finger and thumb as if to display it as a specimen
of those mere trifles over which Mr. and Mrs. Ellicott used to become
proudly enraged at each other in the days before she had faded him so
completely.

Nancy, after a night of intensive sleeplessness broken only by dreams of
seeing Oliver being married to somebody else in the lobby of the Hotel
Rosario can only wonder rather dully when it could ever have been that
poor father was allowed enough initiative of his own to take even
the passive part in a quarrel over a trifle and why mother thinks the
prospect implied in her speech of her daughter's marriage being like
unto hers can be so comforting. Nancy made one New Year's resolution the
second day of her engagement, "If I ever find myself starting to act to
Ollie the way mother does to father I'll simply have to leave him and
never see him again." But Mrs. Ellicott goes on.

"If Oliver is at all the sort of young man we must hope he is, he will
certainly come and apologize at once. And if he should not--well Nancy,
my little girl," she adds hieroglyphically "there are many trials that
seem hard to bear at first which prove true blessings later when we see
of what false materials they were first composed."

Mr. Ellicott thinks it is time for him to go to the office. It is five
minutes ahead of his usual time but Mrs. Ellicott has been looking at
him all the way through her last speech until he feels uneasily that he
must be composed of very false material indeed. He stops first though to
give an ineffective pat to Nancy's shoulder.

"Cheer up, Chick," he says kindly. "Always sun somewhere you know, so
don't treat the poor boy too hard," and he shuffles rapidly away before
his wife can look all the way through him for the vague heresy implicit
in his sentence.

"It is all very well for your father to say such things, but, Nancy,
darling, you shall not be put upon by Tramplers" proceeds Mrs. Ellicott
in her most cryptically perfect tones. "Oliver is a man--he must
apologize. A man, I say, though little more than a boy. And otherwise
you would now be pursuing your Art in Paris due to dear kind Mrs.
Winters who has always stood our truest friend and now this other
opportunity has come also but I would never be the first to say that
even such should not be sacrificed most gladly for the love of a true
k