bud."

"No, no," insisted May; "you are so cynical, Rose, like everybody else
now-a-days, and I hate it. He can never be glad to have lost Dora."

"Don't you agree with me, Annie?" Rose maintained her point.

"Really, you seem to be so well informed on the subject yourself--though
I cannot think where you have got your experience, any more than your
slang, unless at second-hand"--said Annie sarcastically, "that my
opinion is of no importance."

"Now, don't be nasty and elder-sisterish," was Rose's quick rejoinder.

Though Dora shed no tears of contrition in public, Annie, who shared her
sister's room, heard her in the night crying softly.

"What ails you, Dora dear?" Annie sat up and asked sleepily. "What is
the matter? It can't be, no," rousing herself, "it can _not_ be--you
don't mean that you repent what you've done, and would swallow the shop,
foxy hair, and everything?"

"Oh, no," denied Dora, "but I didn't think a man would care like that;
such a queer, gray shade came over his face, though I durst hardly look
at him; and his hands which were--well, were holding mine for a second,
you know----"

"No, I don't know," interrupted Annie, smiling to herself; "but go on,
what about the hands?"

"They were as cold as ice."

"Very likely, it is only the month of April."

"And it is not above a year since he lost both his father and
mother--all the near relations he had."

"Poor man!" admitted Annie. "But you could not help that, and many men,
young men especially, seem to get on quite well without near relations."

There was a strain of hardness about pretty Annie, whether bred of that
cynicism in the air of which May had complained, whether it was an
integral part of Annie, or whether, as in the case of some valuable
kinds of timber, it was merely an indication of the closer grain, the
slower ripening, and the greater power of endurance of the moral fibre.

"Men are not like women." Annie was continuing her lecture. "I dare say
Tom Robinson will do very well--all the better, perhaps, because he has
no ambition, and is content to make money in the most humdrum way as a
tradesman."

Dora sat up in turn, like a white ghost in her place in her little bed,
seen by the dim light. She had the instinct which causes women to look
back upon the men who have made love or proposed to them, even though
the women have rejected the men--as in a sense their property, if not
their prey, so as not by any means to relish