"Your age!" laughed Dorothy. "Cousin Ormond is twenty-three, silly, and I'm eighteen--or close to it."
"And I'm seventeen," retorted Ruyven.
"Yet I throw you at wrestling," observed Dorothy, with a shrug.
"Oh, your big feet! Who can move them?" he rejoined.
"Big feet? Mine?" She bent, tore a satin shoe from her foot, and slapped it down on the table in challenge to all to equal it--a small, silver-buckled thing of Paddington's make, with a smart red heel and a slender body, slim as the crystal slipper of romance.
There was no denying its shapeliness; presently she removed it, and, stooping, slowly drew it on her foot.
"Is that the shoe Sir John drank your health from?" sneered Ruyven.
A rich flush mounted to Dorothy's hair, and she caught at her wine-glass as though to throw it at her brother.
"A married man, too," he laughed--"Sir John Johnson, the fat baronet of the Mohawks--"
"Damn you, will you hold your silly tongue?" she cried, and rose to launch the glass, but I sprang to my feet, horrified and astounded, arm outstretched.