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.