d it!" he burst forth. "It looks as if the fellow was a
dishonorable scamp. And yet he is the last man I should ever have
fancied would prove a scamp."

"But he has not proved himself a scamp yet," said Aimee, in a troubled
tone. "And Dolly would not like to hear you say so. And if you knew the
whole truth you _wouldn't_ say so. He has been tried too far, and he has
been impetuous and rash, but it was his love for Dolly that made him so.
And wherever he may be, Phil, I know he is as wretched and hopeless as
Dolly herself could be at the worst. It has all been misunderstanding
and mischance."

"He has broken Dolly's heart, nevertheless," cried Mrs. Phil. "And if
she dies--"

"Dies!" cried out Mollie, opening her great eyes and turning pale all at
once. "Dies! Dolly?"

"Hush!" said Aimee, trembling and losing color herself. "Oh,
hush!--don't say such things. It sounds so dreadful,--it is too dreadful
to think of!"

And so it came about that on another of these hot June days there
appeared at the _table a'hote_ of a certain well-conducted and already
well-filled inn at Lake Geneva two new arrivals,--a tall, thin, elderly
lady of excessively English exterior, and a young person who attracted
some attention,--a girl who wore a long black dress, and had a
picturesque Elizabethan frill about her too slender throat, and who,
in spite of her manner and the clearness of her bright voice, was too
whitely transparent of complexion and too finely cut of face to look as
strong as a girl of one or two and twenty ought to be.

The people who took stock of them, after the manner of all unoccupied
hotel sojourners on the lookout for sensations, noticed this. One or
two of them even observed that, on entering the room after the slight
exertion of descending the staircase, the girl was slightly out of
breath and seemed glad to sit down, and that, her companion evidently
making some remark upon the fact, she half laughed, as if wishing to
make light of it; and they noticed, too, that her naturally small hands
were so very slender that her one simple little ring of amethyst and
pearls slipped loosely up and down her finger.

They were not ordinary tourists, these new arrivals, it was clear. Their
attire told that at once. They had removed their travelling dresses, and
looked as if they had quite made up their minds to enjoy their customary
mode of life as if they had been at home. They had no courier,
the wiseacres had ascertained,