her surmise. She would
treat the affair as commencing with Storri's request. But she would
watch Dorothy; and if she detected symptoms of failure to appreciate
Storri as a nobleman possessing wealth and station,--in short, if
Dorothy betrayed an intention to refuse his exalted hand,--then she,
Mrs. Hanway-Harley, would interfere. She would take Dorothy in solemn
charge, and compel that obtuse maiden to what redounded to her good.
Mrs. Hanway-Harley doubted neither the propriety nor the feasibility of
establishing a censorship over Dorothy's heart, should the young lady
evince a blinded inability to see her own welfare.

"That is what a mother is for," she ruminated.

Mrs. Hanway-Harley had forcibly administered paregoric in Dorothy's
babyhood; she was ready to forcibly administer a husband now Dorothy was
grown up. The cases were in precise parallel, and never the ray of
distrust entered Mrs. Hanway-Harley's mind. Dorothy was not to escape
good fortune merely because, through some perversity of girlish
ignorance, she might choose to waive it aside.

Mrs. Hanway-Harley had Mr. Harley ask Storri to dinner on an average
twice a week; she made these slender banquets wholly informal, and quite
as though Storri were an intimate family friend. Storri commended the
absence of stilts, this abandonment of the conventional.

"It is what I like!" cried he; "it is the compliment I shall most speak
of when I am back with my Czar."

Following dinner, Mrs. Hanway-Harley would have Storri to the library in
engagingly familiar fashion.

Senator Hanway went always to his study after dinner, to receive
visitors through that veranda door, and prune and train the vine of his
Presidential hopes with confabs and new plans, into which he and those
visitors--who were folk of power in their home States--unreservedly
plunged. Mr. Harley, who was not domestic and feared nothing so much as
an evening at home, would give an excuse more or less feeble and go
abroad into the town. This left Mrs. Hanway-Harley, Dorothy, and Storri
to themselves; and the maternal ally saw to it that the noble lover was
granted a chance to press his suit. That is to say, Mrs. Hanway-Harley
gave Storri a chance so far as lay in her accommodating power; for she
developed an inexhaustible roll of reasons for leaving the room, and in
her kind sagacity never failed to stay away at least five minutes. And a
world and all of love may be made in five minutes, when both part