HOW STORRI WOOED MRS. HANWAY-HARLEY
Storri was a sensualist to his fingers' ends. Being a sensualist, he was
perforce an egotist, and the smallest of his desires became the star by
which he laid his course. Through stress of appetites, as powerful as
they were gross, he had grown sharp to calculate, and quick to see. He
was controlled and hurried down by currents of a turbid selfishness; nor
would he have stopped at any cruelty, balked at any crime, when prompted
of what brute hungers kept his soul awake. He might have wept over
failure, never from remorse. And Storri had set his savage heart on
Dorothy.
Dorothy felt an aversion to Storri, and she could not have told you why.
The mystery of it, however, put no question to her; she yielded with
folded hands, passive to its influence. She did not hate Storri, she
shrunk from him; his nearness chilled her like the nearness of a
reptile. Kipling, the matchless, tells how a Russian does not become
alarming until he tucks in his shirt, and insists upon himself as the
most Eastern of Western peoples instead of the most Western of Eastern
peoples. There is truth to sit at the bottom of this. Dorothy would have
met Storri with indifference had that nobleman seen fit to catalogue
himself, socially, as a Kalmuck Tartar, not of her strain and tribe; she
was set a-shudder when made to meet him under conditions which admitted
the propriety of marriage between them, should she and he agree. As it
stood, Dorothy was alive for flight the moment Storri stepped into her
presence; she knew by intuition the foulness of his fiber, and shivered
at any threat of contact therewith.
Storri was aware of Dorothy's dislike, since aversion is the one
sentiment a woman cannot conceal. The discovery only made him laugh. He
was too much the conqueror of women to look for failure here. Should he,
Storri, who had been sighed for by the fairest of a dozen stately
courts, receive defeat from a little American? Bah! he would have her at
his ease, win her at his pleasure! Dorothy's efforts to avoid him gave
pursuit a piquancy!
While Storri noted Dorothy's distaste of him, he did not get slightest
slant of her tender preference for Richard. As far as he might, Storri
had taught himself contempt for Richard. This was not the simplest task;
it is hard to despise one whom your heart fears, and before whose glance
your own eyes waver and give way. Still, Storri got on with his contempt
beyond what one might have imagined. He considered all Americans beneath
him, and Richard was an American. There he had an advantage at the
start. Also, Richard was of the newspapers. Even those Americans about
him, with their own sneers and shoulder-shrugs, showed him how such folk
were unworthy genteel countenance. They looked down upon Richard, Storri
looked down upon them; the greater included the less, and deductions
were easy. Storri arrived at a most happy contempt of Richard as a
mathematician gets to the solution of a problem, and, being mercurial,
not thoughtful, arranged with himself that Richard was below
consideration.
Richard and Storri made no sign of social recognition when their paths
crossed by chance. At such times the latter held an attitude of staring
superiority--the fellow, perhaps, to that which belonged with Captain
Cook when first he saw the Sandwich Islanders. Had Storri been of
reflective turn he might have remembered that, as a gustatory finale,
those serene islanders roasted the mariner, and made their dinner off
him.
Mr. Harley was a busy man, and yet he had no office rooms. This was not
his fault; he had once set out to establish himself with such a theater
of effort, but Senator Hanway put down his foot.
"No; no office, John!" said that statesman.
Then Senator Hanway, who was as furtive as a mink, called Mr. Harley's
attention to the explanation which a narrow world would give. Those
office rooms would be pointed to as the market-place where corporations
might trade for his, Senator Hanway's, services.
"If you please, we'll have no such argument going about," observed
Senator Hanway.
This want of a business headquarters, while it may have been an
inconvenience to Mr. Harley, now arose to dovetail with the desires of
Storri. It gave him a pretext for calling at the Harley house; with Mr.
Harley as excuse, and making a pretense of having business with him, he
could break in at all manner of queer hours.
Storri made a study of the Harley household. About four of the afternoon
it was Mrs. Hanway-Harley's habit to retire and refresh herself with a
nap, against the demands of dinner and what social gayeties might
follow. Mr. Harley, himself, was apt to be hovering about the Senate
corridors. Or he would be holding pow-wow with men of importance, that
is to say, money, at one of the hotels. Dorothy, who was not interested
in dark-lantern legislation, and required no restoring naps, would be
alone. Wherefore, it became the practice of Storri to appear of an
afternoon at the Harley house, and ask for Mr. Harley. Not finding that
business man, Storri, who did not insist that his errand was desperate,
would idle an hour with Dorothy.
Storri thought himself one to fascinate a woman, and had a fine
confidence in his powers to charm. He had studied conquest as an art.
When he beleagured a girl's heart, his first approaches were modeled on
the free and jovial. During these afternoon calls he talked much,
laughed loudly, and by his manner would have it that Dorothy and he were
on cheeriest terms. Storri made no headway; Dorothy met his laughter
with a cool reserve that baffled while it left him furious.
Storri essayed the sentimental, and came worn with homesickness. He was
near to tears as he related the imaginary sickness of a mother whom he
had invented for the purpose. Dorothy's cool reserve continued. She
sympathized, conversationally, and hoped that Storri would hurry to his
expiring parent's side.
Storri, like Richard, craved a rose and got it; but he fastened it upon
his lapel himself.
On Storri's fourth call Bess Marklin came in. Being there, Bess took
Storri to herself. She betrayed a surprising interest in statistics--the
populations of cities, crops, politics, and every other form of European
what-not--and kept Storri answering questions like a school-boy.
Thereafter, Storri was no sooner in the Harley house when, presto! from
over the way our pythoness sweeps in. Bess was there before the servant
had taken Storri's hat. This disturbing fortune depressed him; he
attributed it to ill luck, never once observing that the instant he
appeared, Dorothy's black maid skipped across to summon Bess.
"Really, Bess," pleaded Dorothy, following Storri's fourth call--she had
gone to the Marklins' just after her admirer left--"really, Bess, if you
love me, rescue me. There was never such a bore! Positively, the
creature will send me to my grave! And, besides,"--with a little
shiver,--"I have a horror of the man!"
And so the good Bess came each time, and faithfully refused to budge for
the whole of Storri's visit. With that, the latter saw less and less
reason to confer with Mr. Harley of an afternoon; also he resolved upon
a change of tactics in his siege of Dorothy.
Thus far Storri had failed, and the failure set him on fire. The savage
in him was stirred. His vanity found itself defied; and the onyx eyes
would burn, and the mustaches twist like snakes, as he reflected on how
he had been foiled and put aside. Had he known that Richard was in
Dorothy's thought, that it was he to hold her heart against him, Storri
would have choked. But he had gathered no such knowledge; nor was he
posted as to those morning love trysts at which Senator Hanway
unconsciously presided.
Storri still visited the Harley house, but his visits were now to Mrs.
Hanway-Harley. And he would pour compliments for that shallow lady,
which said compliments our shallow one drank in like water from the
well. Mrs. Hanway-Harley had never known a more finished gentleman; and
so she told her friends.
"It is a pity," cried Storri one day, "that Europe has none such as
yourself to set examples of refinement! Now if your beautiful daughter
would but make some nobleman happy as his wife! You would come to
Europe, no?" and Storri spread his hands in rapture over so much
possible good fortune. "Yes, if your lovely daughter would but
condescend!" Storri paused, and sighed a sigh of power.
Mrs. Hanway-Harley thought this exceeding fine; the treacle of coarse
compliment sweetened it to her lips. Some would have laughed at such
fustian. Mrs. Hanway-Harley was none of these; the compliment she
laughed at must emanate from someone not a Count. None the less, she
could see that something was at the back of it all. There was Storri's
sigh as though a heart had broken. Had Storri made some soft advance,
and had Dorothy repulsed him? Mrs. Hanway-Harley could have shaken the
girl!
Storri read all this in Mrs. Hanway-Harley's face as though it had been
written upon paper. He saw that the mother would be his ally; Mrs.
Hanway-Harley was ready to enlist upon his side. Thereupon, Storri drew
himself together with dignity.
"In my own land, madam," said Storri, conveying the impression of a
limitless deference for Mrs. Hanway-Harley, "it is not permitted that a
gentleman pay his addresses to the daughter until he has her mother's
consent. I adore your daughter--who could help!--but I cannot tell her
unless you approve. And so, madam," with a deepest of bows, "I, who am a
Russian gentleman, come to you."
Mrs. Hanway-Harley was not so sinuously adroit as her brother, Senator
Hanway, but she was capable of every conventional art. If Storri's
declaration stirred her pride, she never showed it; if her soul exulted
at a title in her family and a probable presentation of herself to
royalty, she concealed it. True, she was inclined to tilt her nose a
vulgar bit; but she did not let Storri perceive it, reserving the
nose-tilting for ladies of her acquaintance, when the betrothal of
Dorothy and Storri should be announced. Indeed, her conduct, on the
honorable occasion of Storri's request, could not have been more
graceful nor more guarded. She said that she was honored by Storri's
proposal, and touched by his delicacy in first coming to her. She could
do no more, however, than grant him the permission craved, and secure to
him her best wishes.
"For, much as I love my daughter," explained Mrs. Hanway-Harley,
mounting a maternal pedestal and posing, "I could not think of coercing
her choice. She will marry where she loves." A sigh at this period. "I
can only say that, should she love where you desire, it cannot fail to
engage my full approval."
Storri pressed his lips to Mrs. Hanway-Harley's hand as well as he could
for the interfering crust of diamonds, and said she had made him happy.
"It will be bliss, madam, to call myself your daughter's husband," said
Storri; "but it will be highest honor to find myself your son."
Storri did not tell Mrs. Hanway-Harley of those afternoon calls, and the
blight of Bess to fall upon them with her eternal crops and politics and
populations. Mrs. Hanway-Harley, while she grievously suspected from
Storri's sigh--which little whisper of despair still sounded in her
ears--that he had met reverses, would not voice 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 parties 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 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-flights
into Montaigne, Voltaire, Amiel, and others of hectic kidney. She
discovered, moreover, a sympathy with those women of strong minds who
have a quarrel with Providence for that they were not made men. Bess
believed in the equality of the sexes, without pausing to ask in what
they were unequal, and stood stoutly for the Rights of Woman, knowing
not wherein She was wronged or in what manner and to what extent She had
been given the worst of life's bargain. Bess was not a blue-stocking, as
Richard would have had it, and made no literary pretenses; but she
suffered from opinions concerning topics such as husband and wife, that
so far had had nothing better than theory to rest upon. All the same,
her friends were deeply satisfied with Bess; which helped that young
lady to a sense of satisfaction with herself and with them.
As head of the Marklins, Bess was made to decide things for herself. At
that, she decided in favor of nothing terrifying. She drank tea between
three and six each afternoon; she kept a cat named Ajax; and she
resolved to marry Mr. Fopling.
The latter young gentleman Bess called to her side when she pleased,
dismissed when he wearied her, and in all respects controlled his
conclusions, his conversations, and his whereabouts, as Heaven meant she
should. Bess preferred that Mr. Fopling call during the afternoon; she
required the morning for her household duties, and, when not screening
Dorothy from Storri, saved the evening for her books.
Ajax was a grave and formal cat, and, in his way, a personage. He was
decorous to a degree, unbended in no confidences with strangers, and
hated Mr. Fopling, whom he regarded as either a graceless profligate or
a domestic animal of unsettled species who, through no merit and by rank
favoritism, had been granted a place in the household superior to his
own. At sight of Mr. Fopling, Ajax would bottle-brush his tail, arch his
back, and explode into that ejaculation peculiar to cats. Mr. Fopling
feared Ajax, holding him to be rabid and not knowing when he would do
those rending deeds of tooth and claw upon him, of which the
ejaculation, the arched back, and the bottle-brush were signs and
portents.
It was the afternoon of the day following one of those Harley dinners
whereat Storri had been the sole and honored guest, and Bess was sipping
her tea. Her two favorites, Ajax and Mr. Fopling, were sitting in their
respective chairs, regarding each other with their usual suspicion and
distrust. Mr. Fopling, by command of Bess and so far as he might control
himself, was paying no attention to Ajax. Ajax, for his part, was
surveying Mr. Fopling with a sour stare, as though he found much in that
young gentleman's appearance to criticise. At intervals, he made
growling comments upon Mr. Fopling.
"Unless you and Ajax can agree," observed Bess soberly, "one or the
other might better go into the library."
Mr. Fopling made no demur; he was glad to go. When he was out of the
room, Ajax came and rubbed about his mistress as though claiming credit
for ousting Mr. Fopling, of whom he was certain Bess thought as badly as
did he.
Bess was sitting where she commanded a prospect of the street. Who
should come swinging up the way but Richard? It was the habit of that
rising journalist to make one or two daily excursions past the Harley
house. Richard was none of your moon-mad ones who would strum a midnight
lute beneath a fair maid's window. Still, he liked to walk by the Harley
house; the temporary nearness of Dorothy did his soul good. Besides, he
now and then caught a glimpse of her through the window.
Richard was on the Marklin side of the street, and as he was for going
by--back to Bess and eyes on the Harley house--Bess rapped on the pane
and beckoned him.
Richard lifted his hat and obeyed directly. He had already met Bess
several times when Dorothy and he, with a purpose to spin out their
eleven-o'clock interview, had seized on Bess as a method. They could not
remain staring at one another in Senator Hanway's study; even that
preoccupied publicist would have been struck by the strangeness of such
a maneuver. The best, because the only, thing was to make a pretext of
Bess and transfer their love-glances to her premises. This was the
earliest time, however, that Richard had been asked to visit Bess alone,
and he confessed to a feeling of curiosity, as he climbed the steps,
concerning the purpose of the summons.
Bess some time before had had that threatened talk with Richard
concerning marriage and husbands.
"Wedlock," declared Bess, on that edifying occasion, while Richard
grinned and Dorothy rebuked him with a frown, "wedlock results always in
the owner and the owned--a slave and a despot. That is by the wife's
decree. The husband is slave and she despot, or he the despot and she
the slave, as best matches with her strength or weakness. Some women
desire slavery; they would be unhappy without a tyrant to obey."
"And you--are you of those?" asked Richard, half mocking Bess.
"No; I prefer the rôle of despot. It is the reason why I shall marry Mr.
Fopling."
"And yet Mr. Fopling might turn out a perfect Caligula," said Richard,
with a vast pretense of warning. Mr. Fopling was not there to hear
himself ill-used.
"Mr. Fopling," observed Bess, in tones of lofty conviction, "has no
ambitions, no energies, no thoughts; and he has money. In brief, he is
beset by none of those causes that excite and drive men into politics or
literature or trade. He will have nothing to consider in his life but
me."
"But," said Richard, "Mr. Fopling might turn out in the end a veritable
Vesuvius. Mr. Fopling has often struck me as volcanic; who shall say
that he will not some day erupt?"
Bess was not to be frightened.
"Mr. Fopling will do and say and think as I direct; and we shall be
very, very happy."
Richard gave Dorothy a comical look of simulated dismay; and shook his
head as though counseling against such heresies.
"Of course," Bess continued, "what I propose for Mr. Fopling would not
do for you. Were you and I to marry"--Dorothy started--"it would result
in civil war. I've no doubt that you will be given a wife worthy your
tyrannical deserts. She will find her happiness in sitting at your feet,
while her love will make you its trellis to climb and clamber on."
The conversation was not so foolishly serious as it sounds, and for the
most part Bess and Richard were indulging in just no more than so much
verbal sparring. Dorothy took no side; those questions of marriages and
wives and husbands would ever find her tongue-tied if Richard were
around.
"Will you have some tea?" asked Bess, when Richard, in response to the
rapped window, made his way into her presence.
No, Richard would not have tea.
"Then you may smoke," said Bess. "That proves me your friend, doesn't
it?" as Richard started a grateful cloud. "Now, to repay my friendship,
I want to ask a question and a favor."
"You shall!" cried Richard magniloquently. Bess and he were on amiable
terms, and he was secretly assured that the blonde pythoness approved
him. "What am I to answer? What am I to do? Has the cherished Fopling
gone astray? Say but the word, and I shall hale him to your feet."
"Mr. Fopling is in the library," replied Bess. "He and Ajax could not
get along without quarreling, and I separated them. The question and the
favor refer to Dorothy."
Richard colored.
"What is the question?" said he, his voice turning deep and soft.
"Do you love her?" This staggered Richard. Bess came to his aid. "I know
you do," said she; "I'll answer the query for you. The real question I
wanted to ask is, Have you told her? And that I'll answer: You have
not."
"What does this lead to?" broke in Richard. A half-score of daunting
surmises had come up to shake him.
"Don't you think you might better tell her?" continued Bess, not heeding
the question.
"She knows," returned Richard, drawing a breath. "Dorothy knows. I've
seen the knowledge in her eyes. And she loves me!"
"I've no doubt you've seen marvelous things in one another's eyes,"
retorted Bess in a matter-of-fact way; "but I say again: Wouldn't it be
wise to tell her?"
"Frankly, yes," replied Richard, driven desperate. "I have been on the
threshold of it, but somehow I couldn't lay hands on just the words.
Dorothy knows I love her!" he repeated as though to himself. "It would
be only a formality."
"There is the very point," observed Bess. "It is the formality that has
become important. Do you think I would break in upon your dreams, else?
A formality is a fence. If you owned a bed of flowers, would you build a
fence about it? Then fence in your Dorothy with a formal offer of your
love."
"I shall not rest until I've done so!" cried Richard, catching fire.
"And then you will have done the wise and safe and just and loving
thing! Who taught you to ignore formalities? They are one's evidence of
title. Build your fence. It will be like saying to Storri: So far shalt
thou come and no farther."
Bess looked curiously at Richard. She had mentioned Storri in a mood of
mischief, as one spurs a gamesome horse to stir its mettle. Richard's
brow was a thundercloud.
"Why do you name Storri with Dorothy?--a serpent and a dove!" he said,
in tones very slow and full.
"Dorothy will tell you," replied Bess. "She will turn marvelously
loquacious, once she finds herself behind her fence."
"How shall I go to her?" exclaimed Richard. "My heart will be sick until
I've told her."
"You will not have long to wait," said Bess laughingly. "She should have
been here ten minutes ago. I can't see what detains her."
Richard looked bewildered and a little shocked. "Surely," he began,
"Dorothy didn't----"
"No, no; you are not the victim of a plot, Sir Suspicious One!" cried
Bess. "It is a wonder that you are not, for your dullness surpasses
belief. Do you imagine Dorothy doesn't see you every time you walk this
street? that she hasn't seen you to-day? that she didn't see you come
in? that she won't invent some pretext for running over? Oh, foolish,
foolish bridegroom! You may guess how foolish by peeping from the
window, for here your Dorothy comes."
At this, the benignant Bess, having questioned, advised, admonished,
and, in a measure, berated Richard, gave him her hand, as if she would
give him courage; and Richard, with the praiseworthy purpose of getting
all the courage he could, lifted it to his lips. That was the blasting
tableau at the moment Dorothy stood in the door.
"Oh!" cried Dorothy. Then her brow crimsoned, and her eyes began to
shine like angry stars.