ments and brushes, and
divested himself of his painting apron. "I don't want to look at it
now. I've got it, but I can't stand the strain of contemplating it
till my brain cools a trifle. Let's go out and celebrate."

"Where shall we go?" Nancy said. This was the moment she had dreamed
of for weeks, the hour of fruition when the work was done, and they
could face each other, man and woman again with no strip of canvas
between them.

"The place I always go when I've finished a picture is a little cafe
under the shadow of _Notre Dame_, where I get cakes and beer and an
excellent perspective on all my favorite gargoyles."

"And the little birds flutter in the sun, and eat my crumbs and the
great music swells out while you ask the _garcon_ for another _bock_.
Do you remember, father dear, the day that _she_ found us there?"

"I remember only that you made yourself ill eating _Madelaines_ and
had to be taken home _en voiture_," Collier Pratt said quickly. "We
will go and have some coffee at the Cafe des Artistes, and discuss
ships and shoes and sealing wax--anything but the art of painting."

"And cabbages and kings," Sheila contributed ecstatically. "I used to
think when I was a very little girl and couldn't read English very
well that it was really Heaven where Alice went, and it made me sad to
think she was dead and I didn't understand it, but now Miss Dear has
explained to me."

"Miss Dear has made a good many things clear to us both," Collier
Pratt said, but he said no more that might be even remotely construed
as referring to the issue between them, and Nancy finished out her day
with dragging limbs and an aching empty heart that a word of
tenderness would have filled to running over.

But after her work for the day was done, and she was back in her own
apartment with Sheila tucked snugly in bed, and Hitty out for the
night with a sick friend, there came the touch on her bell that she
knew was Collier Pratt's; and she opened the door to find him standing
on her threshold.

"I knew you'd come," she said, as women always say to the man they
have that hour given up looking for.

"I wasn't sure I would," Collier Pratt said, "but I did, you see."

"Why weren't you sure?" She stood beside him in her little rectangular
hall while he divested himself of his cape, and placed his hat, stick
and gloves in orderly sequence on the oak settee beside it. She liked
to watch the precision with which he always arranged these