mean, I am very pleased to meet
you. I was very sick, but I am better now, and I am going to live with
Miss Dear."

"It seems to be settled," her father said, shrugging.

"Would you mind it so very much?" Nancy asked.

"I wouldn't mind it at all," Collier Pratt said. "I think it would be
a delightful arrangement,--if I'm to take you seriously."

"Nancy is always to be taken seriously," Betty put in. "What she
really wants of the child is to use her for dietetic experiment, I'm
sure."

"That's what she's used to, poor child," Collier Pratt said ruefully.

The removal of Gaspard created a diversion. Nancy took Sheila in to
bid him good-by, and the great creature was so touched by the farewell
kiss that she imprinted on his forehead, and the revelation of the
fact that a fellow being had been suffering kindred throes in the
chamber just beyond his own that he was of two minds about letting
himself be moved at all from her proximity. A group of waitresses
collected on the second landing, and Nancy and her friends stood
together at the head of the stairs while the white-coated intern from
the hospital rolled his great bulk upon a fragile-looking stretcher,
and with the assistance of all the male talent in the establishment,
managed to head him down the stairs, and so on across the court and
into the waiting ambulance.

Nancy's eyes filled with inexplicable tears, and she caught Collier
Pratt regarding them with some amusement.

"He's such a dear," she said somewhat irrelevantly. "I really didn't
care whether he was sick or not this morning,--but you get so fond of
people that are around all the time."

"I don't," said Collier Pratt,--he spoke very lightly, but there was
something in his tone that made Nancy want to turn and look at him
intently. She seemed to see for the first time a shade of defiant
cruelty in his face,--"I don't," he reiterated.

"I do," Nancy repeated stubbornly, but as she met his slow smile, the
slight impression of unpleasantness vanished.

"We artists are selfish people," he said. "I'm going to run away now,
and leave my daughter to cultivate your charming friends. Will you
come and eat your dinner at my little table to-night, and talk,
discuss this matter of her visit to you?"

"I will if there is any dinner," Nancy said, putting out a throbbing
hand to him.

There was a dinner. It was Hitty's conception of an emergency
meal--the kind of thing that her mother before her had prepared