“Who is she?” said Abel, laughing, sinking into a chair. “Mother wrote me you said that all Boston girls are dowdy. Who is the dowdy of next winter?”
“Mrs. Alfred Dinks,” replied Fanny, carelessly, but looking with her keenest glance at Abel.
He, sprang up and began to say something; but his sister’s eye arrested him.
“Oh yes,” said he, hurriedly—“Dinks, I’ve heard about Alfred Dinks. What a devil of a name!”
“Come, dear, you’d better go up stairs and see mamma,” said Fanny; “and I’m so sorry you missed Aunt Dagon. She was here this morning, lovely as ever. But I think the velvet is wearing off her claws.”
Fanny Newt laughed a cold little laugh. Abel went out of the room.
“Master Abel, then, does know Miss Hope Wayne,” said she to herself. “He more than knows her—he loves her—or thinks he does. Wouldn’t he have known if she had been engaged to her cousin?”
She pondered a little while.
“I don’t believe,” thought Miss Fanny, “that she is engaged to him.”
Miss Fanny was pleased with that thought, because she meant to be engaged to him herself, if it proved to be true, as every body declared, that he had ten or fifteen thousand a year.