her small effort at coquetry; Chandos, leading her on, and
evidently enjoying the task he had set himself intensely.

It was quite a new Mollie who was left to them after their visitor was
gone. There was a touch of triumph and excitement in the pretty flushed
face, and a ghost of defiance in the brown eyes. She was not quite sure
that young Dame Prudence would not improve the occasion with a short
homily.

So she was a trifle restless. First she stood at the window humming an
air, then she came to the table and turned over a few sketches, then she
knelt down on pretence of teasing Tod.

But impulse was too much for her. She forgot Tod in a few minutes
and fell into a sitting position, folding her hands idly on the blue
garment.

"I knew he would come," she said, abstractedly. Then Dame Prudence
addressed her.

"Did you?" she remarked. "How did you?"

She started and blushed up to her ears.

"How?" she repeated. "Oh, I knew!"

"Perhaps he told you he would," put in Dame P. "Did he?"

"Aimee," was the rather irrelevant reply, rather suddenly made, "do you
like him?"

"I never judge people," primly enunciated, "upon first acquaintance.
First impressions are rarely to be relied upon."

"That 's a nice speech," in her elder sister's most shockingly flippant
manner, "and it sounds well, but I have heard it before--thousands of
times. People always say it when they want to be specially disagreeable,
and would like to cool you down. There is the least grain of Lady
Augusta in you, Aimee."

"And considering that Lady Augusta is the most unpleasant person we
know, _that_ is a nice speech," returned the oracle.

"Oh, well, I only said 'a grain,' and a grain is not much."

"It is quite enough."

"Well," amiably, "suppose we say half a grain."

"Suppose we say you are talking nonsense."

Mollie's air was Dolly's own as she answered her,--people always said
she was like Dolly, despite the fact that Dolly was not a beauty at all.

"There may be something in that," she said.

"Suppose we admit it and return to the subject Do you think he is nice,
Aimee?"

"Do you?"

"Yes, I do," but without getting rose-colored this time.

Aimee looked at her calmly, but with some quiet scrutiny in her glance.

"As nice," she put it to her,--"as nice as Ralph Gowan?"

She grew rose-colored then in an instant up to her ears again and over
them, and she turned her face aside and plucked at the hearth-rug with
nervous fin