Nancy was able to discover the little girl’s preferences by a tactful question here and there when they were making the rounds of the different counters. She wanted, it developed, a golden-haired doll with a white fur coat, a pair of roller skates, an Indian costume, a beaded pocketbook, with a blue cat embroidered on it, a parchesi board to play parchesi with her Uncle Dick, some doll’s dinner dishes, a boy’s bicycle, some parlor golf sticks, a red leather writing set, a doll’s manicure set, a sailor-boy paper doll, a dozen small suede animals in a box, a drawing book and crayon pencils and several other trifles of a like nature. The things she did not want she rejected unerringly. It pleased Nancy to realize that she knew exactly what she did want, even though her range of 242 taste was so extensive. Nancy had a sheaf of her own cards with her address on them in her pocketbook, and each time Sheila saw the thing her heart coveted Nancy nodded to the saleswoman and whispered to her to send it to the address given and charge to her account.
They took their lunch in a famous confectionary shop, full of candy animals and alluring striped candy sticks and baskets. Here Sheila’s eye was taken by a basket of spun sugar flowers, which she insisted on buying for Gaspard. By the time they were ready to resume their shopping tour, Sheila began to show signs of fag, so they bought only brooches for the waitresses, and the watch as thin and exquisite of workmanship as a man’s pocket watch could be, for Collier Pratt.
“I think we had better give it to him now, Miss Dear,” Sheila decided. “I don’t see how he can wait till Christmas for it—it is so beautiful. He has not had a gold watch since that time in Paris when we had all that trouble.”
“What trouble, Sheila dear?” Nancy said. She had tucked the child in a hansom, and they were driving slowly through the lower end of 243 Central Park to restore Sheila’s roses before she was exhibited to her parent.
“When we lost all our money, and my father and some one I must not speak of, had those dreadful quarrelings, and we ran away. I do not like to think of it. My father does not like to think of it.”
“Well, then, you mustn’t, dear,” Nancy said, “but just be glad it is all over now. I don’t like to realize that so many hard things happened to you and him before I knew you, but I do like to think that I can perhaps prevent them ever happening to you again.”
She closed resolutely that department of her mind that had begun to occupy itself with conjectures concerning the past of the man to whom she had given her heart. The child’s words conjured up nightmare scenes of unknown panic and dread. It was terrible to her to know that Collier Pratt had the memory of so much bitterness and distress of mind and body locked away in the secret chambers of his soul. “Some one of whom I must not speak,” Sheila had said, “and some one of whom I must not think,” Nancy added to herself. It was 244 probably some one with whom he had quarreled and struggled passionately maybe, with disastrous results. He could not have injured or killed anybody, else how could he be free and honorably considered in a free and honorable country? She laughed at her own melodramatic misgivings. It was only, she realized, that she so detested the connotation of the words “ran away.” Nancy had never run away from anything or anybody in her life, and she could not understand that any one who was close to her should ever have the instinct of flight.
The most conscientious objector to New York’s traffic regulations can not claim that they fail to regulate. The progress of their cab down the avenue was so scrupulously regulated by the benignant guardians of the semaphores that twilight was deepening into early December evening before they reached their objective point,—the ramshackle studio building on the south side of Washington Square where the man she loved lived, moved and had his being, with the gallant ease and grace which made him so romantic a figure to Nancy’s imagination.
She had never been to his studio before without 245 an appointment, and her heart beat a little harder as, Sheila’s hand in hers, they tiptoed up the worn and creaking stairs, through the ill-kept, airless corridors of the dingy structure, till they reached the top, and stood breathless from their impetuous ascent, within a few feet of Collier Pratt’s battered door.
“I feel a little scared, Miss Dear,” Sheila whispered. “I thought it was going to be so much fun and now I don’t think so at all. Do you think he will be very angry at my coming?”