"He's such a dear," she said somewhat irrelevantly. "I really didn't care whether he was sick or not this morning,--but you get so fond of people that are around all the time." "I don't," said Collier Pratt,--he spoke very lightly, but there was something in his tone that made Nancy want to turn and look at him intently. She seemed to see for the first time a shade of defiant cruelty in his face,--"I don't," he reiterated. "I do," Nancy repeated stubbornly, but as she met his slow smile, the slight impression of unpleasantness vanished. "We artists are selfish people," he said. "I'm going to run away now, and leave my daughter to cultivate your charming friends. Will you come and eat your dinner at my little table to-night, and talk, discuss this matter of her visit to you?" "I will if there is any dinner," Nancy said, putting out a throbbing hand to him. There was a dinner. It was Hitty's conception of an emergency meal--the kind of thing that her mother before her had prepared on wash-day when an unexpected relative alighted from the noon train, and surprised her into inadvertent hospitality. It began with steamed clams and melted butter sauce. Hitty knew a fish market where the clams were imported direct from Cape Cod by the nephew of a man who used to go to school with her husband's brother, and he warranted every clam she bought of him. They were served in soup plates and the drawn butter in demi-tasses, but Hitty would have it no other way. The _pièce de résistance_ was ham and eggs, great fragrant crispy slices of ham browned faintly gold across their pinky surface, and eggs--Hitty knew where to get country eggs, too--so white, so golden-yolked, so tempting that it was difficult to associate them with the prosaic process of frying, but fried they were. With them were served boiled potatoes in their jackets,--no wash-day cook ever removed the peeling from an emergency potato,--and afterward a course of Hitty's famous huckleberry dumplings, the lightest, most ephemeral balls of dumplings that were ever dipped into the blue-black deeps of hot huckleberry--not blueberry, but country huckleberry--sauce. "Where's the coffee?" Nancy asked Dolly miserably, when the humiliating meal was drawing to its close. "She won't make coffee," Dolly whispered; "she says it will keep everybody awake, and they're much better off without it, but Miss Betty, she's watching her chance, and she's making it." Collier Pratt had received each course in silence, but had eaten heartily of the food that was set before him. "I suppose he was hungry enough to eat anything," Nancy thought; "the lunch was humiliating enough, but this surpasses anything I dreamed of."