"She's well enough," he replied indifferently. "I believe," said Nancy, looking through her wine-glass far off somewhere, "that she'll suit you better than I." "She treats me better." "She doesn't write verses?" this with a glance from under her eyelids. "She does not." "Nor think her own way always the best?" "She's very sweet and yielding, as becomes a woman," Danvers answered teasingly. "She's just without sin at all," Nancy continued with apparent dejection. "Entirely," Danvers returned solemnly, but with a laugh shining through his long black lashes. "Then I'd better not meet with her--I, who have so many failings." "Have you failings?" Dandy asked, and the teasing tone left him. "I've yet to find them." And at this Nancy broke into a laugh so funny and contagious that the two of us joined with her. "Have I failings?" she repeated. "That I have! And so many 'twould be a day's work to name them. "Sometimes," she began, "I make light of other folks' religion when I disagree with it--and that's little short of scandalous. And I belittle the people whom I don't like--and there's no breeding in that; and where a friend is concerned I'm like the Stewarts, 'Back to back, and a claymore in each hand,' and----" "Ye're right in that," Danvers and I broke in like a chorus. "And sometimes," she went on, and the humor she found in these revelations concerning herself was a droll thing to see, "sometimes I use bad language----" We men broke into a roar of laughter at this. "Once, I remember," she said, with the gleam in her eye, "I danced till three in the morning at Peggy MacBride's wedding, and getting out of the coach twisted my arm till I thought I'd broken it. About four of the same morning I rose with a raging tooth, and crossing the room for laudanum, I struck the elbow of the injured arm against a chest of drawers, and before I thought I said----" "What?" Danvers cried, his face lit up with merriment. "Nothing will ever make me tell," she said firmly, "nothing!" "Whatever it was, it was moderate. You haven't a vocabulary sufficient for that situation, Nancy Stair," I laughed. "Then, too, I'm no respecter of family," she went on, as though set for complete absolution. "It's mayhap because my own mother was an Irish gipsy----" "Nancy!" Dandy cried with amazement. "She was so," Nancy insisted, "and the present lord's grandfather was a strange old cummer who ran away with another man's wife----" "Nancy!" I expostulated, "Nancy, you mustn't talk in that way of your forbears----" "Why not?" she inquired. "It's a thing ye can't explain, my dear; but it just isn't done," Dandy said.