"Yes, I'm happy," Nancy said, "but I'm sort of--stirred, too. I wish you were my own little girl, Sheila. I think I'll take you with me to the Inn to-day. You might melt and trickle away if I left you alone here with Hitty." "_Quelle joie!_ I mean, how nice that will be! Then I can talk about Paris to Gaspard, and he will give me some baba, with a _soupçon of maraschine_ in the sauce, if you will tell him that I may, Miss Dear." "I'll think about it." It was Nancy's dearest privilege to be asked and grant permission for such indulgences. "Put on that floppy white hat with the yellow ribbon, and take your white coat." "When I had only one dress to wear I suppose I got just as dirty," Sheila reflected, "only it didn't show on black satin. Now I can tell just how dirty I am by looking. I make lots of washing, Miss Dear." "Yes, thank heaven," Nancy said, unaccountably tearful of a sudden. The first part of the day at the Inn went much like other days. Gaspard, eager to retrieve the record of the week when Hitty and a Viennese pastry cook had divided the honors of preparing the daily menus between them--for Nancy had never again attempted the feat--never let a day go by without making a new _plat de jour_ or inventing a sauce; was in the throes of composing a new casserole, and it was a pleasure to watch him deftly sifting and sorting his ingredients, his artist's eyes aglow with the inward fire of inspiration. Nancy called all the waitresses together and offered them certain prizes and rewards for all the buttermilk, and prunes and other health dishes that they were able to distribute among ailing patrons,--with the result they were over assiduous at the luncheon hour, and a red-headed young man with gold teeth made a disturbance that it took both Hilda and Michael, who appeared suddenly in his overalls from the upper regions where he was constructing window-boxes, to quell. But these incidents were not sufficiently significant to make the day in any way a memorable one to Nancy. It took a telephone message from Collier Pratt, requesting, nay demanding, her presence in his studio for the first sitting on her portrait, to make the day stand out upon her calendar. "Sheila is with me. Shall I bring her?" Nancy asked. "No," Collier Pratt said uncompromisingly, "I am not a parent at this hour. She would disturb me." "What shall I wear?" "What have you got on?" "That blue crêpe, made surplice,--the one you liked the other night." "That's just what I want--Madonna blue. Can you get down here in fifteen minutes?" "Yes, I'll send Michael up-town with Sheila."