"There is something else I have not told you," he continued, taking his resolution suddenly, and determined to put a stop, at all risks, to this dangerous softness; "but then, to be sure, I have only just known it myself. Have you heard that our school-mistress, Miss Marriott, has come into a large fortune?"
"Why no!" she returned, very much startled and becoming a little pale.
"It is a whim of hers hiding it from all of us as she has done. Why, she was a rich woman when you first made her acquaintance! I call it a tidy little fortune, five thousand a-year."
"Why has she hidden it? What has been her purpose?" she inquired, with a sudden sharpness in her tone that struck him directly, but he answered her carelessly.
"Oh, I don't know; some girlish nonsense or other, nothing at all to her discredit, rather the otherwise." But he said no word about the loan. It was no business of Dora's; it was a matter simply between themselves, so he told himself.
But Dora's cheek had paled visibly. "I thought you hated money and heiresses," she said at last, very slowly, and looking him full in the face.
Garth flushed uneasily, the inference was too obvious.
"Did I say a word about hating or the reverse, Dora?" he asked, in some displeasure. In his vexation he had called her Dora.
"I feared you had made up your mind never to call me that again," she said, looking at him very gently. "I have thought since," hesitating and dropping her eyes, "that I was wrong and foolish in what I said to you that night, and you were perfectly right in being angry with me. Couldn't you—haven't you forgiven me yet, Mr. Garth?"
Then he jumped up from his seat, and his face was full of pain. She was still his old friend and playmate, and how was he to misunderstand her? Was it forgiveness only for which she was asking, or was it a tacit permission for a renewal of his attentions? Either way, he must set things right between them now and for ever, for her sake, for his, and for Queenie's.