their frocks to their knees. Bess came
not only that evening, but every Storri evening; and whether or no she
were a welcome, at least she was a pertinacious visitor, for she stayed
unrelentingly until Storri, losing courage, went his way.

Storri bit his angry lip over Bess, for he now began to read the
argument of her advent. It was Dorothy's defense against him, and in its
kind an insult. Mrs. Hanway-Harley also became more and more instructed
in this love-match so near her heart, and those difficulties which the
capricious coldness of Dorothy arranged for its discouragement. The
placidity of Mrs. Hanway-Harley was becoming ruffled; the hour was
drawing on apace when she would make clear her position. She would issue
those commands which were to fix the attitude of Dorothy towards the
sighing Storri and his love.

Dorothy called Bess her guardian angel. The G. A. accepted the position
and its duties with that admirable composure which you have already
observed was among her characteristics. The fair Bess was one of those
whom their friends, without intending offense, describe as mildly
eccentric. That is to say, Bess had peculiarities which were in part
native and in part the work of an environment. She was an only child,
and that was bad; she was a doctor's child, and that was worse. Not that
her father had been so recklessly dense as to try his drugs on her; he
knew too much for that. But your doctor's children oft get an unusual
bringing up, and the chances in favor of the extraordinary in that
behalf are doubled where there is only one child.

Mother Marklin had been an invalid from the babyhood of Bess. Father
Marklin, in those intervals when his brougham was not racing from one
languid, dyspeptic, dance-tired, dinner-weary, rout-exhausted woman to
another at ten dollars a drooping head, looked after Bess in that spirit
of argus-eyed solicitude with which a government looks after its crown
jewels. Bess was herded, not to say hived, and her childish days were
days of captivity. She was prisoner to her father's loving
apprehensions, he being afraid to have her out of sight.

Then came her father's death, and the Marklin household devolved upon
Bess's hands when the hands were new and small and weak; and the load
served to emphasize Bess in divers ways. When not waiting upon the
invalid Mother Marklin, Bess broke into her father's bookshelves, and
read the owlish authors such as Bacon and Dr. Johnson, with side-