She had given up trying to estimate the calories that each man was likely to average in partaking of Hitty's menu. She noticed that a great many of her patrons had taken second helpings, and that threw her out in her calculation of quantities, while the relative digestibility of the protein and the fats in pork depend so much upon its preparation that she could not approximate the virtue of Hitty's bill of fare without consultation with Hitty. "That was a very excellent dinner," Collier Pratt broke through her painful reverie to make his pronouncement. "Astonishing, but very satisfactory. It reminds me of days on my grandfather's farm when I was a youngster." "I should think it might," Nancy said, for the first time in her relation with her new friend becoming ironical on her own account. Then she added seriously, "It's Hitty, you know, that will have all the real care of Sheila. I'm pretty busy down here, and I--" she hesitated, half expecting him to threaten to remove his child at once from the prospective guardianship of a creature who reverted so readily to the barbarism of ham and eggs. "Well, if it's Hitty that is to have the care of Sheila," Collier Pratt said, and Nancy was not longer puzzled as to which element of her parentage Sheila owed her Irish complexion, "why, more power to her!" Nancy dreamed that night that she was married to Dick, and that Hitty made and served them _pâté de foies gras_ dumplings, while Collier Pratt in freckles and overalls sat in a high chair, and had his dinner with the family. Later it was discovered that Betty had poisoned his bread and milk, and he died in Nancy's arms in dreadful agony, swearing in a beautiful Irish brogue that in all his life he had never looked at another woman,--which even in her dream seemed to Nancy a somewhat irreconcilable statement. CHAPTER X THE PORTRAIT To Nancy's surprise Hitty welcomed the little girl warmly, when she was introduced into the family circle. She liked to be busy all day, and her duties in taking care of Nancy were not onerous enough to keep her full energy employed. She liked children and family life, and she seemed to have the feeling that if Nancy continued to assemble the various parts that go to make up a family, she would end by adding to it the essential masculine element, though it was Dick and not Collier Pratt that she visualized at the head of the table cutting up Sheila's meat for her. Collier Pratt was to her a necessary but insignificant detail in Nancy's scheme of things, a poor artist who had "frittered away so much time in furrin parts" that he was incapable of supporting his only child--"poor little motherless lamb!"--in anything like a befitting and adequate manner. Whenever he came to see Sheila she treated him with the condescension of a poor relation, and served his tea in the second best china with the kitchen silver and linen, unless Nancy caught her at it in time to demand the best.