“And the little birds flutter in the sun, and eat my crumbs and the great music swells out while you ask the garçon 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 Café 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 201 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.