"I shall do nothing of the kind!" cried Dora, her face in a flush; "if he wants that sort of exposure, let him come here. I don't know whether I want him to come or not. I am too young to be thinking of marrying anybody, and though I don't want to be disrespectful to you, Miss Panney, I will say that I am getting dreadfully tired of your continual harping about Ralph Haverley, and trying to make me push myself in front of him so that his lordship may look at me. If he had been at Barport, or there had been any chance of his coming there, I should have suspected that you went there for the express purpose of keeping us up to the work of becoming attached to each other. And I say plainly that I shall have no more to do with exerting influence on him, through his sister or in any other way. There are thousands of other men just as good as he is, and if I have not met any of them yet, I have no doubt I shall do so."
"Dora," said Miss Panney, speaking very gently, "you are wrong when you say that there was no chance of Ralph's coming to Barport. If some things had not gone wrong, I have reason to believe he would have been there before you left, and I am quite sure that if you had stayed there until now, you would have been walking on the sands with him at this minute."
Dora looked at her in surprise, and the flush on her face subsided a little.
"What do you mean?" she asked. "You do not think he would have gone there on my account?"
"Yes, I do," said Miss Panney. "That is exactly what I mean, and now, my dear Dora, do not let—"
At this moment Mrs. Bannister walked into the room, and was very glad to see Miss Panney, and to know that she had returned in safety from the seashore.
When Dora went up to her room, after the visitor had gone, she shut the door and sat down to think.
"After all," she said to herself, "I do not believe much in the thousand other men. Not one of them is here, and none may ever come, and if Ralph really did intend to come to me at the seashore, I wish we had stayed there. It is such a good place to find out just how people feel."
In this frame of mind she sat and thought and thought, until a servant, who had been to the post office, came up and brought her a note from Miriam Haverley.
The next morning Dora Bannister, in an open carriage, drawn by the family bays, appeared at the door of the Witton mansion. Miss Panney, with overshoes on and a little shawl about her, for the mornings were beginning to be cool, was walking up and down between two rows of old-fashioned boxwood bushes. She hurried forward, for she knew very well that Dora had not come to call on the Wittons.