istantly related to his mother. It was not as a cousin that he was
interested in Dora, but as something very much more intimate. I know not
whether it occurred to him that Mrs. Temperly herself would never give
his displeasure the benefit of dropping the affectionate form. She might
shut her door to him altogether, but he would always be her kinsman and
her dear. She was much addicted to these little embellishments of human
intercourse--the friendly apostrophe and even the caressing hand--and
there was something homely and cosy, a rustic, motherly _bonhomie_, in
her use of them. She was as lavish of them as she was really careful in
the selection of her friends.

She stood there with her hand in her pocket, as if she were feeling for
something; her little plain, pleasant face was presented to him with a
musing smile, and he vaguely wondered whether she were fumbling for a
piece of money to buy him off from wishing to marry her daughter. Such
an idea would be quite in keeping with the disguised levity with which
she treated his state of mind. If her levity was wrapped up in the air
of tender solicitude for everything that related to the feelings of her
child, that only made her failure to appreciate his suit more
deliberate. She struck him almost as impertinent (at the same time that
he knew this was never her intention) as she looked up at him--her tiny
proportions always made her throw back her head and set something
dancing in her cap--and inquired whether he had noticed if she gave two
keys, tied together by a blue ribbon, to Susan Winkle, when that
faithful but flurried domestic met them in the lobby. She was thinking
only of questions of luggage, and the fact that he wished to marry Dora
was the smallest incident in their getting off.

'I think you ask me that only to change the subject,' he said. 'I don't
believe that ever in your life you have been unconscious of what you
have done with your keys.'

'Not often, but you make me nervous,' she answered, with her patient,
honest smile.

'Oh, Cousin Maria!' the young man exclaimed, ambiguously, while Mrs.
Temperly looked humanely at some totally uninteresting people who came
straggling into the great hot, frescoed, velvety drawing-room, where it
was as easy to see you were in an hotel as it was to see that, if you
were, you were in one of the very best. Mrs. Temperly, since her
husband's death, had passed much of her life at hotels, where she
flattered herself tha