"What did Dick say to that?" Nancy could not forbear asking. "He said she was very kind, and maybe the time might come when he would think seriously of her offer." There was a feeling in Nancy's breast as if her heart had suddenly got up and sat down again. Betty bore no remotest resemblance to the pale kind girl, practically devoid of feminine allure, that Nancy had visualized as the mate for Dick, and frequently exhorted him to go in search of. "Miss Betty was only making a joke," she told Sheila sharply. "We were all making jokes, Miss Dear," Sheila explained. "I have never loved any one in the world quite so much as I love you, Sheila," Nancy cried in sudden passion as the little girl turned her face up to be kissed, as she always did when the conversation puzzled her. "I like being loved," Sheila said, sighing happily. "My father loves me,--when he is not painting or eating. He is very good to me, I think." "Your father is a very wise man, Sheila," Nancy said, "he understands beautiful things that other people don't know anything about. He looks at a flower and knows all about it, and--and what it needs to make it flourish. He looks at people that way, too." "But he doesn't always have time to get the flower what it wants," Sheila said; "my jessamine died in Paris because he forgot to water them." "Your father needs taking care of himself, Sheila. We must plan ways of trying to make him more comfortable. Don't you think of something that he needs that we could get for him?" "More socks--he would like," Sheila said unexpectedly. "When his socks get holes in them he will not wear them. He stops whatever he is doing to mend them, and the mends hurt him. He mends my stockings, too, sometimes, but I like better the holes especially when he mends them on my feet." Sheila could have presented no more appealing picture of her father to Nancy's vivid imagination. Collier Pratt with the incongruous sewing equipment of the unaccustomed male, using, more than likely, black darning cotton on a white sock--Nancy's mental pictures were always full of the most realistic detail--bent tediously over a child's stocking, while the precious sunlight was streaming unheeded upon the waiting canvas. She darned very badly herself, but the desire was not less strong in her to take from him all these preposterous and unbefitting tasks, and execute them with her own hands. She stared at the child fixedly. "You buy him some socks out of your allowance," she said at last. Then she added an anxious and inadequate "Oh, dear!" "Aren't you happy?" Sheila asked in unconscious imitation of Dick, with whom she had been spending most of her time for days, while Nancy superintended the additions and improvements she was making in the up-stairs quarters of her Inn, preparatory to moving in for the winter.