stopping here for any particular reason?" Caroline said.

Nancy had not spoken in more than a monosyllable since they had
resumed their places in the car again.

"Not now," Dick said wearily. "I thought I'd point out the sights of
the town. This place is called the Gretna Green of America, you know.
A great many runaway couples come out here to be married. The man
inside that office, the one with whiskers and no collar, is the one
that marries them."

"Does he?" Billy asked a trifle uncertainly.

Nancy turned to Dick with a real appeal in her voice. It was the first
time during the day that she had addressed him with anything like her
natural tenderness and sweetness.

"Oh! Dick, can't we start on?" she said.

CHAPTER VIII

SCIENCE APPLIED

Gaspard was ill--very ill. He lay in the little anteroom at the top of
the stairs and groaned thunderously. He had a pain in his back and a
roaring in his head, and an extreme disorder in the region of his
solar plexus.

"Sure an' he's no more nor less than a human earthquake," Michael
reported after an examination.

Nancy applied ice caps and hot-water bags to the afflicted areas
without avail. The stricken man had struggled from his bed in the
Twentieth Street lodging-house that he had chosen for his habitation,
and staggered through the heavy morning heat to his post in the
basement kitchen of Nancy's Inn, there to collapse ignominiously
between his cooking ranges. With Molly and Dolly and Hildeguard at his
feet and herself and Michael and a dishwasher at his head they had
managed to get him up the two short flights of stairs. It developed
that it would be necessary to remove him in an ambulance later in the
day, but for the time being he lay like a contorted Colossus on the
fragile-looking cot that constituted his improvised bed of pain: "Like
the great grandfather," to quote Michael again, "of all of them
Zeus'es and gargoyles, and other cavortin' gentlemen in the yard
down-stairs."

With the luncheon menu before her, Nancy decided that the hour had
come for her to prove herself. She had assumed the practical
management of the business of the Inn only to have the responsibility
and much of the authority of her position taken from her by the very
efficiency of her staff. She was far too good a business woman not to
realize that this condition was distinctly to her advantage, and to
encourage it accordingly, but there was still so much of the child in
her t