ies set
their hearts and souls to the dulcet enterprise.

Storri was ardent, and Mrs. Hanway-Harley was discreet, and both
displayed talents for intrigue and execution that, on other days, in
other fields, might well have saved a state. And yet there was no
blushing progress to the love-making! Dorothy's behavior was
unaccountable. The first evening she sat in marble silence, like an
image. The next, she would not come down to dinner, saying she was sick
and could not eat. The invalid put in a most successful evening in her
room, thinking of Richard, and gorging on miscellaneous dishes which her
sable maid abstracted from below. She would have been ill the third
time, but her mother set her face like flint against such excuse. Mrs.
Hanway-Harley declared that Dorothy's desertion was disgraceful at a
moment when she, her mother, needed her help to entertain their visitor.
With that, Dorothy's indisposition yielded, and she so far recovered as
to play her part at table with commendable spirit, eating quite as much
as her mother, who was no one to dine like a bird. But Dorothy took her
revenge; she talked of nothing but Richard, and the conversations on
politics which he and "Uncle Pat" indulged in during those
eleven-o'clock calls.

Storri glowered; more, he became aware of Richard as the daily comrade
of Dorothy. Mrs. Hanway-Harley herself was struck by some shadow of the
truth; but she got no more than what Scotchmen call a "glisk," and she
gave the matter no sufficient weight. Later, she clothed it with more
importance.

Mrs. Hanway-Harley, however, was moved to reprove Dorothy from out the
wealth of her experiences.

"Child," said she, when Storri was gone, "you should never try to
entertain one gentleman by telling him about another; it only makes him
furious."

"I didn't, mamma," said Dorothy, her eyes innocently round.

"You did, only you failed to notice it," returned Mrs. Hanway-Harley.
"After this, be more upon your guard."

"I will, mamma," replied Dorothy demurely; but she was too sly to say
against what she should guard.

On the next Storri evening, Dorothy returned to the old ruse. She set a
lamp in her chamber window, the effect of the beacon being that Bess
came across from her house, as the clock scored eight and one-half, and
joined the Harley party. It was nothing out of common for Bess to do
this; she and Dorothy had been bosom friends since days when the two
wore their hair in pigtails and