It was a hot night, and Nancy looked a little pale and, although as trim and neat as usual, a little shabby. Her pretty hands in old gloves she had washed herself, her pretty eyes patiently fixed upon the faces of the women who were boring her in her youth and freshness with the business of sickness and poverty, her whole gentle, rather weary aspect, smote Bert's heart with a pain that was half a fierce joy. Never had he loved her in her gaiety and her indifference as he loved her now, when she looked so sweetly, so almost sorrowfully. A week later he went to see her. "Well, Mister Bert Bradley," she smiled at him, unfastening the string from the great box of roses that had simultaneously arrived from some other admirer, "I didn't know what to make of you! And who was the more-than-pretty little girl that you were squiring on the Waldorf roof last week?" "Just my cousin, Dorothy Hamilton. She went back to Boston to-day. She's finished school, and had a year abroad, and now she isn't quite sure what she wants to do. How's Mr. Belknap?" She narrowed her eyes at him mischievously. "Don't you think you're smart! These are from him. He's very well. He took me to the theatre last night, and we had a wonderful time. Come with me into the kitchen, while I put these in water." "Take good care of them!" Bert said witheringly. But she only laughed at him from the sink. He followed her into the small, hot, neat kitchen, with the clean empty pint bottle and the quarter-pint bottle turned upside down near the bright faucets, and the enamel handles of the gas stove all turned out in an even row. Bert remembered that the last time he had been here was a cold May morning, when he and Nancy had made countless hot cakes. He had met her at church, and walked home with her, and while they were luxuriously finishing the last of the hot cakes the others had burst in, with the usual harum-scarum plans for the day. But that was May, and now it was July, and somehow the bloom seemed to be gone from their relationship. They talked pleasantly, and after awhile Mrs. Terhune came in and talked, too. She was distressed about some shares she held in a traction company and Bert was able to be of real service to her, taking a careful memorandum, and promising to see her about it in a day. "For I expect we'll see you round here in a day or two," she said with simple archness. She was well used to the demands of Nancy's beaux. Nancy looked particularly innocent and expectant at this, "Perhaps Mr. Bradley might come in and cheer you up, if I go off with Mrs. Featherstone for the week-end?" she suggested pleasantly. Mrs. Featherstone had been Virginia Belknap.