oblem, then, was to get your money's worth.

She took her head in her hands, and tried to concentrate all her
faculties. She wasn't a shirker, and she realized that she must
decide upon her course of conduct now and stick to it. If she didn't
look out for herself, who would? And presently she had reached the
conclusion that when Mr. Peter Champneys reappeared upon the scene,
he must find Mrs. Peter Champneys occupying the foreground, and
occupying it creditably, too. She'd do it! When Mr. Chadwick
Champneys recovered, she'd come to terms with him. She'd keep faith.

She spent three or four anxious days, while specialists came and
went, and white-capped, starched, authoritative personages
relieved each other in the sick-room, their answers to all queries
being that the patient was doing quite as well as could be
expected. At the end of the fifth day they admitted that the
patient was recovering,--was, in fact, out of danger, though he
wouldn't leave his room for another week or ten days; and he
wasn't to be worried or disturbed about anything.

Satisfied, then, that he was on the highroad to recovery, and
having made up her mind as to her own course of procedure, Nancy
rather enjoyed these few days of comparative freedom. She supplied
herself with a huge box of bonbons, "Junie's Love Test" and "The
Widowed Bride,"--books begun long ago, but wrested from her untimely
by the ruthless Mrs. Baxter, on the score of takin' her time off:
her rightful work for them that'd took her in, and fillin' her red
head with the foolishest sort o' notions. She had had so much to do
that to have nothing to do but lie around in a red silk kimona and
nibble chocolates and read love stories, seemed to her the supreme
height of felicity.

She reveled in these novels. They represented that something
different toward which her untutored and stinted heart groped
blindly. Otherwise her mind, by no means a poor one, lay fallow and
untilled. The beauty and wonder of the world, the pity and terror of
fate, the divine agony of love which sacrifices and endures, did not
as yet exist for her. She merely sensed that there was something
different, somewhere--maybe on the road ahead. And so she wept over
the woes of star-crost lovers, and sentimentalized over husky heroes
utterly unlike any male beings known to nature, and believed she
didn't believe that disinterested and unselfish love existed in the
world. As she hadn't the faintest gleam of self-kn