"What! Victor?"
Then followed embraces and inquiries; and Dolly began to feel out of place, and the stranger that she was, when Miss Marr turned, smiled, begged her pardon, and introduced her to her nephew,—Victor Graham, who was just back from his vacation at Moosehead Lake. With the grace and tact that people called "that French way" of hers, Miss Marr managed to include Dolly in the conversation, and, finding that she had spent several summers at Kineo, the Moosehead Lake region, drew her out by clever questions to tell what she knew about it. And Dolly knew a great deal about it; she had paddled a canoe on the lake, she had caught fish and helped cook them on the shore, and she had camped out in the Kineo woods.
Victor Graham, tall as he was, was only sixteen,—a real boy who loved out-of-door sports,—and, delighted to find somebody who was so familiar with the charmed region he had just reluctantly left, was soon in the full swing of reminiscences and questions. Had she been to this place, did she know that point, etc., etc.? In short, he felt as if he had met a comrade, and he treated her as such,—as a boy like himself; and Dolly for the moment responded in the same spirit, and forgot her stiff dignity and young lady manners, patterned after her sister Mary's.
Miss Marr sat back in her chair, looking and listening and smiling. Dolly had not the least idea that she was reading, as one would read in a book, a little page of Dorothea Dering. But she was. Dolly, in talking to Victor, forgot, as I have said, her dignity and young-lady manners, and was the Dolly Dering who romped and raced and paddled and cooked at Moosehead Lake.
"Not so very awkward, and not shy at all, but a big overgrown girl, who may one day be an attractive woman, when she is toned down and less crude and hoydenish."
This was part of Miss Marr's reading as she looked and listened; and as Dolly, getting more excited with her subject, went on more glibly, her silent smiling listener thought,—
"A good deal of a spoiled child evidently, who has been used to having her own way and been laughed at for her smart sayings until she is quite capable, I fear, of being rude and overbearing, if not unfeeling on occasions. But I think there is good material underneath. We'll see, we'll see."
What would Dolly have said if she could have heard this criticism of Dorothea Dering? What would Mrs. Dering have said if she could have heard her daughter called capable of being rude and overbearing? What would Mary have said to the whole summing up,—Mary, who was not of the kind ever to have been spoiled by indulgence, who was finer and had better instincts than Dolly? Mary would have said, "Oh, Dolly, Dolly, what have I always told you?"
Just as Miss Marr came to the conclusion of these reflections, she looked up at the clock on the mantel, and gave a quick start. Victor, following the direction of her eyes, stopped the story of camp-life that he was telling, and jumped to his feet, saying,—
"Do excuse me, Aunt Angel; I'd no idea it was so late."