"Beattie has a letter that she must finish to-night, and will be down presently," returned Dora carelessly; "she is writing in the old school-room. You remember the school-room, do you not, and the cosy teas we have had there? we still keep it for the girls' use. I must get papa to do it up prettily for them next summer."
"Couldn't she have left her letter until to-morrow?" asked Garth, half laughing, but the little subterfuge secretly displeased him. Why should his favorite be banished to that dreary schoolroom? and why should Flo be set to watch her father's slumbers? "I don't like the look of this at all," he muttered to himself, and again that allusion to Circe crossed his mind.
"Come and sit down," exclaimed Dora, with playful petulance. "Never mind Beattie's whim, girls will have their own way, and she does not mean to be rude; and now tell me, sir, why you have been so cool all this time, and treated me so shabbily?"
He was in for it now he saw, but he feigned to misunderstand her.
"How have I treated you shabbily?" he asked, with a tolerable assumption of innocence.
There was an ominous flash in Dora's blue eyes, but she answered him gently and plaintively.
"Why, in your letters, to be sure; they were as brief and cold as possible, not a trace of the old friendship, not even a regret at my long absence. They deserved to be burnt, every one of them, but I hadn't the heart," dropping her voice and looking at him with dangerous sweetness.
"I wish you had," he returned coolly, for he was in no mood for this sort of thing. Another time all this might have pleased and allured him; he might have been faithful in his allegiance to Queenie, and yet have taken a certain pleasure in watching her and listening to her reproaches. She was such a picturesque little creature, and there was something so sweetly seductive in her manners to him, that he would not have been a man and not felt the power of her fascination; but the memory of his past tenderness for her was now a source of regret to him, and he was too much shattered by the storm that had swept over him to amuse himself with aimless love-making. "I wish you would destroy all my letters, Miss Cunningham," he went on, gravely; and then he remembered that he had not yet told her about the failure of his fortunes.
He touched on it now, but lightly, and she listened with the deepest interest.
"Poor Mr. Clayton, how shocking to lose all that money! I am so grieved about it, and you never told me about that either!" with reproachful tenderness, and the mistiness he had before noticed gathered slowly to her eyes.