And Dick saying nothing, but continuing to stare into space--the panoramic space fleeting rhythmically by the car window,--she let herself gradually slip into the depths of sudden drowsiness that had overtaken her. CHAPTER XX HITTY Hitty put on her bonnet--she had worn widow's weeds for twenty-five years--and went out into the morning. She finally succeeded in boarding a south-bound Sixth Avenue car,--though since it was her habit to ignore the near side stop regulation, she always had considerable trouble in getting on any car,--and in seating herself bolt upright on the lengthwise seat, her black gloved hands folded indomitably before her. At Fourth Street she descended and made her way east to the square, and thence to the top floor of the studio building to which Collier Pratt had taken his little daughter on the memorable occasion when he had plucked her from her warm nest of blankets and led her, sleepy and shivering, into the cold of the night. She had been at some pains to secure the address without taking Nancy into her confidence. She took each creaking stair with a snort of disgust, and reaching the battered door with Collier Pratt's visiting card tacked on the smeary panel on a level with her eye, she knocked sharply, and scorning to wait for a reply, turned the knob and walked in. Collier Pratt was making coffee on a small spirit lamp, set on the wash-stand, which was decorously concealed during the more formal hours of the day behind a soft colored Japanese screen. He was wearing a smutty painter's smock, and though his face was shining with soap and water, his hair was standing about his face in a disorder eloquent of at least a dozen hours' neglect. Sheila, in a mussy gingham dress, was trying to pry off the pasteboard covering of a pint bottle of milk with a pair of scissors, and succeeding only indifferently. They both turned on Hitty's entrance, and the milk bottle went crashing to the floor when the little girl recognized her friend, but after one terrified look at her father she made no move at all in Hitty's direction. "And to what," Collier Pratt ejaculated slowly and disagreeably, as is any man's wont before he has had his draught of breakfast coffee, "am I to attribute the pleasure of this visit?" "It ain't no pleasure to me," Hitty said, advancing, a figure of menace, into the center of the dusty workshop, strangely uncouth and unprepossessing in the cold morning light,--"and if it's any pleasure to you, that's an effect that I ain't calculated to produce. I've come here on business--the business of collecting that poor neglected child there, and taking her back where she belongs, where there's folks that knows enough to treat her right." "Another of Miss Martin's friends and well-wishers, I take it. These American girls are given to surrounding themselves with groups of warm and impulsive associates. Do you by any chance happen to know a young lawyer by the name of Boynton, Hitty? A collection lawyer?"