"Billy borrowed some money for me." "On what security?" "I don't know." "Why didn't he come to me?" "I told him not to." "Nancy, do you realize that you're the most exasperating woman that ever walked the face of this earth?" the unhappy lover asked. Nancy managed to convey the fact that Dick's asseveration both surprised and pained her, without resorting to the use of words. "I wish you wouldn't spoil this lovely party," she said to him a few seconds later. "I'm extremely tired, and I should like to get my mind off my business instead of going over these tiresome details with anybody." "You look very innocent and kind and loving," Dick said desperately, "but at heart you're a little fraud, Nancy." She interrupted him to point out two children laden with wild flowers, trudging along the roadside. "See how adorably dirty and happy they are," she cried. "That little fellow has his shoestrings untied, and keeps tripping on them, he's so tired, but he's so crazy about the posies that he doesn't care. I wonder if he's taking them home to his mother." "You're devoted to children, Nancy, aren't you?" Dick's voice softened. "Yes, I am, and some day I'm going to adopt a whole orphan asylum,"--her voice altered in a way that Dick did not in the least understand. "I could if I wanted to," she laughed. "Maybe I will want to some day. So many of my ideas are being changed and modified by experience." The road-house of his choice, when they reached it, proved to have deteriorated sadly since his last visit. The cool interior that he remembered had been inopportunely opened to the hottest blast of the day's heat, and hermetically sealed again, or at least so it seemed to Dick; and the furniture was all red and thickly, almost suffocatingly, upholstered. Nancy had no comment on the torrid air of the dining-room,--she rarely complained about anything. Even the presence of a fly in her bouillon jelly scarcely disturbed her equanimity, but Dick knew that she was secretly sustained by the conviction that such an accident was impossible under her system of supervision at Outside Inn, and resented her tranquillity accordingly. Caroline, behaving not so well, seemed to him a much more human and sympathetic figure, though her nose took on a high shine unknown to Nancy's demurer and more discreetly served features; but Billy evidently preferred Nancy's deportment, which was on the surface calm and reassuring. "Nancy's a sport," he pointed out to Caroline enthusiastically, "no fly in the ointment gets her goat. She enjoys herself even when she's perfectly miserable." "She doesn't feel the heat the way I do," Caroline snapped. "I feel the heat," Nancy said, "but I--" "She's got a system," Dick cut in savagely: "she stands it just as long as she can, and then she takes it out of me in some diabolical fashion." Nancy's gray-blue eyes took on the far-away look that those who loved her had learned to associate with her most baffling moments.