ft considerable to be desired
in that respect, himself. With his hatchet face and his outstanding
ears and his big nose--why, he was as homely as that dried old
priest in the glass case in the museum!--and him looking down on
people every mite as good as he was! That was really the crux of the
thing: Nancy had her own pride, and Peter had managed to trample
upon it roughshod. She felt she could never forgive him, and her
sense of injury included Chadwick Champneys as well. She hadn't
asked him to make his nephew marry her, had she? The suggestion had
come from the Champneys, not from her. Yet it was plain to her that
both these men considered her a very inferior person. She couldn't
understand them.

She liked the furnished apartment she and Mr. Champneys were to
occupy until their house was ready, better than she had liked the
hotel, though the Japanese butler, Hoichi, overawed her. She wasn't
used to Japanese butlers and she didn't know exactly how to treat
this suave, deft, silent yellow man who was so efficient and so
ubiquitous. It was different where the maids were concerned; she who
had been so lately an unpaid drudge was afraid these trained, clever
servants might suspect her former state of servitude and she covered
her fear with a manner so insupportable that Mr. Chadwick Champneys,
who looked upon arrogant rudeness to social inferiors as a sort of
eighth deadly sin, was presently forced to remonstrate.

"Nancy," he ventured one morning, "I have been observing your
manner to the servants with--er--disapproval. A habitual lack of
consideration is a serious deficiency. It is really a lack of
breeding--and of heart. A lady"--he fixed his large dark eyes upon
her--"is never impolite."

He touched her on the quick. She _knew_ these Champneys didn't think
she was a lady, but for this old man to come right out and say so to
her face--"Say, I guess I know how to be a lady without you havin'
to tell me!"

"I am more than willing to be convinced," said the South Carolinian,
pointedly.

At that, of a sudden, Nancy flared. She lifted a pair of sullen and
mutinous eyes, and her lips quivered. He saw with surprise that she
was trembling.

"Say, you look here--I done what you told me to do, didn't I? I
ain't no more nor no less a lady than I was before I done it, am I?
What you pickin' on me for, then? What more you want?"

He sighed. Milly's niece was distinctly difficult, to say the least.
How, he asked himself