"I could make it pay any time that I wanted to."

"Sometimes I wonder if you are in full possession of your senses."

"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 sc.r.a.p, 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," d.i.c.k 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," d.i.c.k 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 Elysees_. 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, d.i.c.k?" 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 d.i.c.k," 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 aimee_."

d.i.c.k 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 aimee_," 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," d.i.c.k 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.

d.i.c.k was already opening the door of the tonneau and a.s.sisting Nancy out of the car.

"I'm going to leave Sheila with Williams, and take you over the house, Nancy. She'll be more interested in the grounds than she would in the interior. I want you to see the inside."

He took a key out of his pocket, and unlocked the stately door.

Everything about the place was gigantic, stately,--the huge columns that supported the roof of the porch, the big elms that flanked it, and the great entrance hall, as they stepped into its majestic enclosure.

"It's a biggish sort of place, isn't it?" Nancy said.

"But it's rather lovely, don't you think so?" d.i.c.k asked anxiously.

"These old places are getting increasingly hard to find,--real old homes, dignified and beautiful, within a reasonable distance from town."

"It is lovely," Nancy said, "it could be made perfectly wonderful to live in. I can see this big hall--furnished in mahogany or even carved oak that was old enough. Thank heaven, we're no longer slaves to a _period_ in our decorating; we can use anything that's beautiful and suitable and not intrinsically incongruous with a clear conscience."

"Come up-stairs."

Nancy lingered on the landing of the fine old staircase, white banistered with a mahogany hand-rail, that turned only once before it led into the region up-stairs.

"I'd rather see the kitchen," she said.

"The kitchen isn't the thing that I'm proudest of. Its plumbing is early English, or Scottish, I'm afraid. I think this arrangement up here is delightful. See these front suites, one on either side of the hall. Bedroom, dressing-room, sitting-room. Which do you like best? I thought perhaps I might take the one that overlooks the orchard."

Nancy stopped still on her way from window to window.

"d.i.c.k Thornd.y.k.e, whose house _is_ this?" she demanded.

"Mine."

"Yours--have you bought it?"

"Yes, I put the deed in my safe deposit vault yesterday. Come in here. Isn't this a cunning little guest chamber nested in the trees? Be becoming to Betty's style of beauty, wouldn't it?" He held the door open for her ingratiatingly, and she pa.s.sed under his arm perfunctorily.

"What on earth did you buy a house like this for?"

"I thought you might like it."

"I--what have I to do with it?"

d.i.c.k turned the rusty key in the lock deliberately, and put it in his pocket, thus closing them into the little musty room which had no other exit. A branch of flaming maple leaves tapped lightly on the window.

"You've a whole lot to do with it, Nancy," he said. "It's yours, and I'm yours, and I want to know how much longer you're going to hedge."

"I'm not hedging," Nancy blazed. "Take that key out of your pocket.

This is moving-picture stuff."

"I know it is. I can't get you to talk to me any other way, so I thought I'd try main force for a change."

"Well, it is a change," she agreed. "Shall I begin to scream now, or do you intend to give me some other provocation?"