ater, as she took her place at the little table
beside him, where she habitually ate her dinner. "If you don't like it
you are to tell me, and I'll see that you have things you will like."

"This dinner is good," he said reflectively, "like French home
cooking. I haven't had a real _ragout_ of lamb since I left the
pension of Madame Pellissier. Has your mysterious patroness got tired
of furnishing _diners de luxe_ to the populace?"

"Not exactly that," Nancy said, "but she--she wants me to try out
another way of doing things."

"I thought that would come. That's the trouble with patronage of any
kind. It is so uncertain. There is no immediate danger of your being
ousted, is there?"

"No," Nancy said, "there--there is no danger of that."

"I don't like that cutting you down," he said, frowning. "It would be
rather a bad outlook for us all if she threw you over, now wouldn't
it?"

"Oh!--she won't, there's nothing to worry about, really."

"It would be like my luck to have the only cafe in America turn me
out-of-doors.--I should never eat again."

"I promise it won't," Nancy said; "can't you trust me?"

"I never have trusted any woman--but you," he said.

"You can trust me," Nancy said. "The truth is, she couldn't put me out
even if she wanted to. I--she is under a kind of obligation to me."

"Thank God for that. I only hope you are in a position to threaten her
with blackmail."

"I could if anybody could," Nancy said. She put out of her mind as
disloyal, the faintly unpleasant suggestion of his words. He owed her
mythical patron a substantial sum of money by this time. He was not
even able to pay Michael the cash for the nightly teapot full of
Chianti that Nancy herself now sent out for him regularly. For the
first time since her association with him she was tempted to compare
him to Dick, and that not very favorably; but at the next instant she
was reproaching herself with her littleness of vision. He was too
great a man to gauge by the ordinary standards of life. Money meant
nothing to him except that it was the insignificant means to the end
of that Art, which was to him consecrated.

They were placed a little to the left of the glowing fire--Nancy had
restored the fireplace in the big central dining-room--and the light
took the brass of the andirons, and all the polished surface of copper
and pewter and silver candelabra that gave the room its quality of
picturesqueness.

"Some of those branching can