ness to public opinion.
She thinks constantly what people will say of this, that, or the
other trifling thing, and in that way perpetually loses sight of
the realities of life. There is a great deal of good in her that
you have never seen because for the moment she is absolutely
obsessed by her objection to your name and her conviction that
Dorothea might and should marry a title. My sister married
Reginald Valentine more for the effect on her future
visiting-card than anything else, but Dorothea's father
bequeathed his good looks, his sunny disposition, his charm, and
his generous nature to his daughter. You have chosen wisely, my
dear Mr.--boy, but not more wisely, to my mind, than Dorothea
has!"

So it ended, but I somehow hope that I may have converted your
mother from an enemy alien to an armed neutral!

"There is nothing more of--of--general interest," said Dolly
tearfully, as she slipped the letter in the envelope. "Aunt Maggie is
a trump. Oh, Charlotte! if only you had ever had a love-problem like
mine and could advise me! Duke always wondered that you never
married."

(Dorothea ought to be cuffed for impertinence, but she is too
unconscious and too pretty and lovable for corporal punishment.)

"Perhaps there may still be hope even at thirty!" I said stiffly.

"Oh, I didn't mean that! You might have anybody by lifting your
finger! We only wonder you've never lifted it! But you could be happy
only with a very learned and prominent man, you are so clever!"

"I'm clever enough to prefer love to learning, if I have to choose,
Dolly, my dear."

"I'm so sorry you didn't get a letter, Charlotte," said the girl,
snuggling sympathetically to my side on the bench.

This was more than flesh and blood or angel could bear!

I kissed her, and, shaking her off my shoulder vigorously, I said, as
I straightened my hat: "As a matter of fact, Miss Valentine, I have
had a letter every day since we left New York; a letter delivered
before breakfast by the steward. You have had but one, yet you are
twenty and I am thirty!"

"_Charlotte!_"

"Don't add to your impudence by being too astonished, darling," I
continued. "Come! let's go and pick bananas and pineapples and
tamarinds and shaddocks and star-apples and sapodillas!"

"I won't budge a step till you tell me all about it!"

"Then you'll grow to this green bench and have to be cut away by your
faithful Marmaduke!"

"Is it a secret?"