"For heaven sake's, Betty," Billy cried, "I don't like your style of conversation. I'm in a state of gloom myself, to-night." "I didn't say I was in a state of gloom," Betty said. They rode the rest of the way in silence, but when Dick got out of the cab to open her door for her, she whispered to him, "I'm awfully ashamed, Dick," before she fled up-stairs through the darkened hallway of her own home. "Queer little thing,--Betty," Billy said as Dick stepped back to the cab again, "you never know where you have her. Full of the deuce as she can stick. Unscrupulous little rascal, too, but made of good stuff." "Don't you think so?" Billy inquired presently as Dick did not answer. "Think what?" "That Betty's a queer sort of girl." Dick took his pipe out of his pocket and began stuffing it full of tobacco. When this was satisfactorily accomplished, he struck a match on his boot heel, and lit the mixture, drawing at it critically meanwhile. "Damn' queer," he admitted, between puffs. CHAPTER XV CLOUDS OF GLORY Nancy, trailing clouds of glory, took up the management of her Inn with renewed vigor. She had found her touchstone. The flower of love, which she had scarcely understood to be indigenous to the soil of her own practical little garden, had suddenly lifted up its head there in fragrant, radiant bloom. She was so happy that she was impatient of all the inadequate, inefficient manipulation of affairs in the whole world. She felt strong and wise to put everything right in a neglected universe. She loved. She was satisfied to live in that love for the present, with no imagination of the future except as her lover should construct it for her; and in him she had absolute faith. The things that he had said or left unsaid had no significance to her. Before she had dreamed of a personal relation with him he had singled her out as a creature made for the consummation and fulfilment of the greatest passion of all. The merest suspicion that there had been a man in the world who could have frustrated this beautiful potentiality in her had moved him profoundly. There was nothing in her experience to help her to differentiate between the sensibility of the artistic temperament and the manifestations of the more reliable emotions. The presence in the human breast of a fire that gave out light and not heat was a condition undreamed of in her philosophy. To doubt Collier Pratt's love for her in the face of his tacit pursuit of her, and the acceptance of the obligation she had chosen to put him under, would have seemed to her the rankest kind of heresy.