“I’m going to take you up in my arms,” said 138 Nancy with sudden passion. “I want to feel how thin you are, and I want to feel how you—feel.”
“Why, your eyes are wetting,” the little girl exclaimed as she nestled contentedly against Nancy’s breast, where Nancy had gathered her, converted table-cloth and all.
“It’s your not having enough to eat,” Nancy cried. “Oh! baby child, honey. How could they? It’s your calling me Miss Dear, too,” she said. “I—I can’t stand the combination.”
The child patted her cheek consolingly.
“Don’t cry,” she said; “my father cries because I get so hungry, when he forgets, but he does forget again as soon.”
“Would you like to come and live with me, Sheila?” Nancy asked.
“I think so, Miss Dear.”
“Then you shall,” Nancy said devoutly.
Collier Pratt found his child in Nancy’s arms when he again mounted the stairs to the third floor of Outside Inn. The place was curiously cool to one who had been walking the sun-baked streets, and he gave an appreciative glance at the dim interior and the tableau of woman and child. Nancy’s burnished head bent gravely 139 over the shadowy dark one resting against her bosom.
“All right again, is she?” he inquired with the slow rare smile that Nancy had not seen before that day.