"Caroline is affected that way, too. I feel that she is likely to get an alienist in at any time. She is so earnest in anything she undertakes. She and Billy have had a scrap, did you know it?" "I didn't." "Billy wants to marry her, and he has shocked her delicate feelings by suggesting it to her." "I imagine you have a good deal to do with her feelings on the subject," Dick said gloomily. "I suppose at heart you don't believe in marriage, or think you don't and you've communicated the poison to Caroline." "I've done nothing of the kind," Nancy insisted warmly. "I do believe in marriage with all my heart. I think the greatest service any woman can render her kind in this mix-up age is to marry one man and make that marriage work by taking proper scientific care of him and his children." "This is news to me," Dick said. "I thought that _you_ thought that the greatest service a woman could do was to run Outside Inn, and stuff all the derelicts with calories." "That's a service, too." "Sure." They were out beyond the stately decay of the up-town drive, with its crumbling mansions and the disheveled lawns surrounding them, beyond the view of the most picturesque river in the world, though, comparatively speaking, the least regarded, covering the prosaic stretch of dusty road between Van Courtland Park and the town of Yonkers. "I like the _Bois_ better," Sheila said, "but I like Central Park better than the _Champs Elyseés_. In Paris the children are not so gay as the grown-up people. Here it is the grown-up people who are without smiles on the streets." "Why is that, Dick?" Nancy asked. "That's always true of the maturer races, the gaiety of the French is appreciative enthusiasm,--if I may invent a phrase. The children haven't developed it." "I would like to have my hand held, Monsieur Dick," Sheila announced. "I always feel homesick when I think about Paris. I was so contente and so _malheureuse_ there." "Why were you unhappy, sweetest?" Nancy asked. "My father says I am never to speak of those things, and so I don't--even to Miss Dear, my _bien aimée_." Dick lifted Sheila into his lap, he took the hand that still clung to Nancy's in his warm palm, and held them both there caressingly. "My _bien aimée_," he said softly. Beyond the town a more gracious and magnificent country revealed itself; lovely homes set high on sweeping terraces, private parks and gardens and luxuriant estates, all in a blaze of October radiance with the glorious pigments of the season. "Isn't it time to go back?" Nancy asked. "Not yet," Dick said. "I want to show you something. There's an old place here I want you to see. That colonial house set way back in the trees there." "Williams is driving in," Nancy said as they approached it. "He's been here before." "Are we going to get out?" Sheila asked. Dick was already opening the door of the tonneau and assisting Nancy out of the car.