Outside Inn Part 20

"Don't be coa.r.s.e, darling." There is a certain disadvantage in having known the woman who is the object of your tenderest emotions all your life, and to be on terms of the most familiar badinage with her. d.i.c.k was feeling this disadvantage acutely at the moment. He took a step toward her, and put a heavy hand on her shoulder. "Nancy, don't you love me?" he said, "don't you really?"

"No," Nancy said deliberately, "I don't, and you know very well I don't. Unlock that door, and let's be sensible."

"Don't you know, dear, or care that you're hurting me?"

"No, I don't," Nancy said. "You say so, and I hear you, but I don't really believe it. If I did--"

"If you did--what?"

"Then I'd be sorrier."

"You aren't sorry at all, as it stands."

"I find it's awfully hard to be sorry for you, d.i.c.k, in any connection. There's really nothing pathetic about you, no matter how tragic you think you are being. You're rich and lucky and healthy. You have everything you want--"

"Not everything."

"And you live the way you want to, and eat the food you want to--"

"The ruling pa.s.sion."

"And make the jokes you want to." Nancy literally stuck up a saucy nose at him. "There is really nothing that I could contribute to your happiness. I mean nothing important. You are not a poor man whom I could help to work his way up to the top, or a genius that needs fostering, or a--"

"Dyspeptic that needs putting on a special diet,--but for all that I do need a mother's love, Nancy."

"I don't believe you do," Nancy said, a trifle absently. "Unlock the door, d.i.c.k. I don't think Sheila put on that sweater when I told her to, and I'm afraid she'll get cold."

"Kiss me, Nancy."

"Will you unlock the door if I do?"

"Yes'um."

Nancy put up cool fragrant lips to meet a brother's kiss, and for the moment was threatened with a second salute that was very much less fraternal, but the danger pa.s.sed. d.i.c.k unlocked the door and let her pa.s.s him without protest.

"If you had been any other girl," he mused, as they went down the stairs together companionably, "you wouldn't have got away with that."

"With what?" Nancy asked innocently.

"If you don't know," d.i.c.k said, "I won't tell you. If you'd been any other girl I should have thrown that key out of the window when you began to sa.s.s me."

"And then?" Nancy inquired politely.

"And then," d.i.c.k replied finally and firmly.

"Are there any other girls?" Nancy asked, faintly curious, as they stood on the deep steps of the porch waiting for Sheila and Williams who were emerging from the middle entrance.

d.i.c.k met her glance a little solemnly, and hesitated for a perceptible instant.

"Are there, d.i.c.k?" she insisted.

"Yes, dear," he said.

CHAPTER XIII

THE HAPPIEST DAY

It was thoroughly characteristic of Nancy to turn her back on the most significant facts of her experience, and occupy herself exclusively with its by-products. She refused to consider herself as an heiress ent.i.tled to spend money lavishly for her own uses, but she squandered it on her pet enterprise. She dismissed the idea that d.i.c.k, whom she neglected to discourage as decisively as her growing interest in another man would seem to warrant, had bought a country estate for the sole purpose of ensconcing her there as mistress. She dreamed of Collier Pratt and his ideal of her, and presented herself punctually at his studio as a model for that ideal, while ignoring absolutely the fact that he was nearly a hundred dollars in debt to her for meals served at Outside Inn. She had sufficient logic and common sense to apply to these matters, and sufficient imagination to handle them sympathetically, had she chosen to consider them at all, but she did not choose. She was deep in the adventure of her existence as differentiated from its practical working out.

The day Collier Pratt finished his portrait of her she was not alone in the studio with him. Sheila, in a fluffy white dress with a floppy black satin hat framing her poignant little face, was omnipresent at the interview which succeeded the actual two hours of absorption when he put in the last telling strokes.

"It's done," he said, as he set aside pigments and brushes, and divested himself of his painting ap.r.o.n. "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 s.h.i.+ps 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 things.

"Why should I be sure?" He turned and faced her. "Miss Dear," he said to himself softly, "Miss Dear," and she saw that in his eyes which made the moment simpler for her to bear.

She led the way into her drawing-room.

"Light the candles," he said, "this firelight is too good to drown in a flood of electric light!"

"Is that better?" she asked.

They were standing before the fireplace; the embers had burned to a gentle glowing radiance. Of the four candles she had lighted, the wick of only one had taken fire and was burning. Nancy's breath caught in her throat, and she could not steady it. Collier Pratt took a step forward and held out his arms.