ant to feel how thin you are, and I want to feel how you--feel."

"Why, your eyes are wetting," the little girl exclaimed as she nestled
contentedly against Nancy's breast, where Nancy had gathered her,
converted table-cloth and all.

"It's your not having enough to eat," Nancy cried. "Oh! baby child,
honey. How could they? It's your calling me Miss Dear, too," she said.
"I--I can't stand the combination."

The child patted her cheek consolingly.

"Don't cry," she said; "my father cries because I get so hungry, when
he forgets, but he does forget again as soon."

"Would you like to come and live with me, Sheila?" Nancy asked.

"I think so, Miss Dear."

"Then you shall," Nancy said devoutly.

Collier Pratt found his child in Nancy's arms when he again mounted
the stairs to the third floor of Outside Inn. The place was curiously
cool to one who had been walking the sun-baked streets, and he gave an
appreciative glance at the dim interior and the tableau of woman and
child. Nancy's burnished head bent gravely over the shadowy dark one
resting against her bosom.

"All right again, is she?" he inquired with the slow rare smile that
Nancy had not seen before that day.

"Yes," Nancy said, "she's better. She's under-nourished, that's what
the trouble is."

"I suspected that," Collier Pratt said ruefully. "I'm not specially
talented as a parent. I feed her passionately for days, and then I
stop feeding her almost entirely. Artists in my circumstances eat
sketchily at best. The only reason that I am fed with any regularity
is that I have the habit of coming to this restaurant of yours. By the
way, is it yours? I found you in charge to-day to my amazement."

"I am in charge to-day," Nancy acknowledged; "in fact I have taken
over the management of it for--for a friend."

"The mysterious philanthropist."

"Ye-es."

"Then I will refrain from any comment on the lunch to-day."

"Oh! that--that was a mistake," Nancy cried, "an experiment. Gaspard
the _chef_--was ill."

"He was very ill, father, dear," Sheila added gravely, "like crossing
the Channel, much sicker than I was. I was only sick like crossing the
ocean, you know."

"These fine distinctions," Collier Pratt said, "she's much given to
them." His eyes narrowed as they rested again on the picture Nancy
made--the cool curve of her bent neck, the rise and fall of the
breast in which the breathing had quickened perceptibly since his
coming,--the child swathed