"You mean that you're going to marry a man to whom your father will be bitterly opposed, and you expect me to win his joyful benediction."
"That's about it," Dorothea sighed, from the depth of her cushions.
"Of course, I must be grateful to you, dear, for this display of confidence; but you won't be surprised if I find it rather overwhelming."
"I shall be very much surprised, indeed. I've never seen you find anything overwhelming yet; and you've been put in some difficult situations. You only have to live things in order to make other people take them for granted. You've never done anything to specially please father, and yet he listens to you as if you were an oracle. It's the same way with me. If any one had told me two years ago that I should ever come to praying for a stepmother I should have thought them crazy; and yet I have come to it, just because it's you."
After that it was not unnatural that Diane should go and sit on the divan beside Dorothea for any exchange of such confidences as could not be conveniently made from a distance. If she admitted anything on her own part, it was by implication rather than by direct assertion, and though she did not promise in words to come to the aid of the youthful lovers, she allowed the possibility that she would do so to be assumed.
So, in soft, whispered, broken confessions the evening slipped away more rapidly than the day had done, and by ten o'clock they knew he must be near. The last touch of welcome came when they passed from room to room, lighting up the big house in cheerful readiness for its lord's inspection. When all was done Dorothea stationed herself at a window near the street; while Diane, with a curious shrinking from what she had to face, took her seat in the remotest and obscurest corner in the more distant of the two drawingrooms. When the sound of wheels, followed by a loud ring at the bell, told her that he was actually at the door, she felt faint from the violence of her heart's beating.
Dorothea danced into the hail, with a cry and a laugh which were stifled in her father's embrace. Diane rose instinctively, waiting humbly and silently where she stood. At their parting she had torn herself, weeping and protesting, from his arms; but when he came in to find her now, he would see that she had yielded. The door was half open through which he was to pass—never again to leave her!
"Diane is in there."
It was Dorothea's voice that spoke, but the reply reached the far drawing-room only as a murmur of deep, inarticulate bass.
"What's the matter, father?"