"I don't want him to be sick," Sheila said, making herself a nest in
Nancy's lap, and curling around in it like a kitten. "If he was I
should be very, very unhappy, and I am tired of being unhappy, Miss
Dear."

Nancy's arms closed tight about her little body, which was lighter in
her arms than she had ever known it. "Oh! I'm going to make such a
strong well, little girl of you," she cried, "and we're going to have
so many pleasant times together. I'm tired of being unhappy, too,
Sheila, dear."

CHAPTER XXI

LOHENGRIN AND WHITE SATIN

Dick, having la grippe, and doing his bewildered best to get pneumonia
and gastritis by creeping out of bed when his temperature was highest,
and indulging in untrammelled orgies of food and drink and exposure to
draughts, had finally succeeded in making himself physically very
miserable indeed. His mind had been out of joint for weeks. He reached
the phase presently of refusing all nourishment and spiritual
consolation, indiscriminately, and finding himself unbenefited by
these heroic methods, decided in his own mind that all was over with
him.

He knew nothing about sickness, having led a charmed life in that
respect since the measles period, and the persistent misery in his
interior, attacking lung and liver impartially,--to say nothing of the
top of his head and the back of his neck, and as his weakness
increased, his cardiac region where there was a perpetual palpitation,
and the calves of his legs which set up an ache like that of a
recalcitrant tooth,--persuaded him that such suffering as his must be
a certain indication of the approaching end. He had dismissed his
doctor after the first visit, and denying himself to visitors, found
himself alone and apparently in a desperate condition, with no one to
minister to him but paid dependents. It was then that the loss of
Nancy began to assume spectral proportions. He had been so long
accustomed to think of himself as the strong silent lover, equipped
with the patience and understanding that would outlast all the
vagaries of Nancy's adventurous tendencies, that it was difficult to
readjust himself to a new conception of her as a woman that another
and even less worthy man had so nearly won,--under his nose.

He had never thought much of his money until it began to acquire the
virtue of an alkahest in his mind, an universal solvent that would
transmute all the baser metals in Nancy's life and the lives of the
people in