“What! what is that!” and Mr. Bopp looked up with tears still shining in his beard, and intense surprise in every feature of his face.
Dolly turned scarlet, and her heart beat fast as she repeated with an unsteady voice,—
“It was Dick, not I.”
A cloud swept over Mr. Bopp's face, and he knit his brows a moment as if Dolly had not been far from right when she said “he never would forgive the joke.” Presently, he spoke in a tone she had never heard before,—cold and quiet,—and in his eye she thought she read contempt for her brother and herself,—
“I see now, and I say no more but this; it was not kind when I so trusted you. Yet it is well, for you and Richart are so one, I haf no doubt he spoke your wish.”
Here was a desperate state of things. Dolly had done her best, yet he did not, or would not, understand, and, before she could restrain them, the words slipped over her tongue,—
“No! Dick and I never agree.”
Mr. Bopp started, swept three spoons and a tea-cup off the table as he turned, for something in the hasty whisper reassured him. The color sprang up to his cheek, the old warmth to his eye, the old erectness to his figure, and the eager accent to his voice. He rose, drew Dolly nearer, took her face between his hands, and bending, fixed on her a look tender yet masterful, as he said with an earnestness that stirred her as words had never done before,—
“Dollee, he said No! do you say, Yes?”
She could not speak, but her heart stood up in her eyes and answered him so eloquently that he was satisfied.