His look just missed hers; he knew she had seen him; had perhaps
been watching him, but he could not catch her eye again.
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.
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