"Keep her away, Michael," Nancy cried; "go out and head her off. Make her go up-stairs and sit with Gaspard,--anything, but don't let her come in here. If she does I won't answer for the consequences. I'll--I'll--I don't know what I'll do to her." "Throw her in the soup kettle, most likely," Michael chuckled. "Faith, an' I never saw a woman yet that wasn't ready to scratch the eyes out of the next one that got into her kitchen." "She isn't safe," Nancy said darkly. "I need every bit of brain and self-control I have to put this luncheon through. You keep Miss Betty's mind on something else--anything but me and the way I am doing the cooking." "'Tis done," said Michael; "sure an' I'll protect her from you, if I have to abduct her myself!" "I wish he would," Nancy said to herself viciously, "before she gets another chance at Collier Pratt.--Creamed chicken and mushrooms. It's a lucky thing that Gaspard diced the chicken last night, and fixed that macédoine of vegetables for a garnish.--She's a dangerous woman; she might wreck one's whole life with her unfeeling, histrionic nonsense.--I wonder if thirteen quarts of cream sauce is going to be enough." It turned out to be quite enough after the crises in which the butter basis got too brown, and the flour after melting into it smoothly seemed unreasonably inclined to lump again as Nancy stirred the cold milk into it, but the result after all was perfectly adequate, except for the uncanny brown tinge that the whole mixture had taken on. Nancy was unable to restrain herself from taking a sample of it to Gaspard's bedside. "_Mais_--but I can not eat it now," he cried, misunderstanding the purpose of her visit, "nor again--nor ever again. _Jamais!_" "I don't want you to eat it, Gaspard, I want you to look at it, and tell me what makes it that color. It turned tan, you see. I don't want to poison any one." "I am too miserable," Gaspard said. "The sauce--you have made into Béchamel with the browning butter, _voilà tout_. It is better so,--it would not hurt any one in the world but me--and me it would kill." "Poor thing," sighed Nancy, as she took her place by the kitchen dresser again, trying to remember where she had last seen brown eyes that reflected the look of stricken endurance that glazed Gaspard's velvet orbs, recalled with a start that Dick had gazed at her in much the same helpless fashion on their drive home from their recent motor trip in Connecticut. She had been too absorbed in her own distresses to consider anybody's state of mind but her own, on that occasion, but now Dick's expression came back to her vividly, and she nearly ruined a big bowl of French dressing, at the crucial moment of putting in the vinegar, trying to imagine which one of the events of that inauspicious day might conceivably have caused it.