Mrs. Driscoe was not a reasonable woman, never had been reasonable, had no desire to be reasonable; it was therefore not to be expected that she would take a reasonable attitude toward Sidney Renshawe when he went down to Virginia early that spring and asked her for her Nannie. In vain did he argue and cajole, in vain did the dear Colonel remonstrate, in vain did little Nannie cry and plead; to one and all she turned a deaf ear. It was no—no—no then and forever.

The County discussed the situation freely and wondered that so worldly a mother should frown upon so eligible a parti. Sidney Renshawe was well born, fairly rich, rising steadily in his profession; all the County knew that much, though it is doubtful if any one of them had ever been in Radnor. What if Renshawe’s hair was red and his mustache a trifle bristly? Didn’t that add a touch of strength to his face and suggest a resemblance to a certain Prisoner of Zenda, who, though only a man in a book, as every one said, was, nevertheless, the most idolized of heroes. As for poor little Nannie, it was plainly to be seen she was losing flesh over the situation.

As she wrote the girls, she was “torn by conflicting emotions,” using the well-worn phrase because the poor little thing had no words of her own in which to express her feelings. She had never had complex feelings before. Hitherto her life had consisted in loving and being loved, which led her naturally enough into a similar state of things with Sidney Renshawe, who came, saw and conquered her girlish heart. The Colonel was her stanch friend and ally. He liked Renshawe and felt he was just the man to whom he could trust his little girl when the time came to give her up. And that was not necessarily imminent, for if Mrs. Driscoe was unreasonable Renshawe certainly was not and was willing to wait one, two, three years if need be. But Mrs. Driscoe remained obdurate and the household was plunged into a state of strained atmospheric conditions such as had never been known before.

“I can’t help loving him and it isn’t wrong to love him, is it?” little Nannie would say appealingly to the Colonel.

“No, no, Puss, be patient. We’ll win her over soon.” It is doubtful if the Colonel believed this cheerful prophecy, but the child had to be comforted.

Renshawe had remained two weeks with his friends at the plantation adjacent to the Driscoes, seeing Nannie every day. Mrs. Driscoe did not refuse him this boon but, declined to receive him herself and intimated so plainly that the man’s room was preferable to his company that the girl took little pleasure in his visits and agreed with him that it was far better he should go away. Without her mother’s permission she refused to become engaged but the night previous to his departure she allowed him to slip on her finger a certain simple little ring which he reminded her he had been carrying in his pocket since the night they met. The next day he went north leaving his heart in Virginia, with a delicious sense of its security in Nannie’s keeping. The consciousness was strong within him that the winning of such as she was worth the waiting.

And Mrs. Driscoe all this while went about with the aggrieved air of one whose troubles were scarcely to be understood by an unsympathetic world. If she had been put to it she could have given no reason for her opposition to Renshawe, for she had none and had shown him marked favor at the beginning. But that was before, as she told the Colonel, “her suspicions were aroused.” From the moment they were, Renshawe was made unpleasantly conscious of it.

While Nannie, sustained by the Colonel and the County’s backing, got what solace she could out of the days that were so long and oh! so lonely after Sidney left her, he, back in Radnor, turned for comfort to the Dale girls, who took him into their hearts for Nannie’s sake and soon learned to like him for his own. He became a frequent visitor, calling usually Sunday afternoons when he felt he would be less likely to disturb them, and he wrote Nannie that except a certain little girl in Virginia whose name he would never divulge, they were the sweetest girls he had ever known and the bravest. But he did not tell Nannie how as he came to observe them more closely he discovered in their faces little careworn lines which told a tale their lips never would have disclosed and how about Julie, especially, there was a subdued, almost intense manner, as if she were holding herself in a vise. They never spoke of their work or their cares to him or any one else and made light of any passing reference to their business. Indeed, as far as Sidney might have known from them, they lived quite like other girls.

In regard to his friend GrÉmond’s previous connection with them or of his call on Julie, Renshawe knew nothing. The Frenchman left town the day following that on which he had seen Julie and had not referred to the Dales in any way either to him or Dr. Ware, who was left to draw his own conclusions. This was not so simple as might be supposed, for while in one light the man’s sudden disappearance looked as if Julie might have given him his congÉ, viewed from another point, especially taken in connection with a certain happy light in Julie’s eyes these days when he caught her glance, it led him to believe that perhaps the girl had given him her promise but required that he should wait yet a longer time to claim her. The Doctor longed to know and wearied himself with imagining why she did not confide in him. But since she did not, delicacy forbade his mentioning GrÉmond’s name.

Another person who did some speculating over GrÉmond was Mrs. Lennox, but being a woman she arrived at her conclusions quickly and decided that his precipitous flight to France when he had been booked for some weeks in Radnor, argued ill for the result of his trip across the country. She was not at home the one time he had called on her and the fact that he was not at more pains to seek her out and continue the confidential relations established in her sanctum on his previous visit, satisfied her that he could not have found what he was so eagerly seeking. Being a sympathetic woman she was sorry, but she would have thought more of him had he chosen to tell her the outcome of his affairs. As he did not, she dismissed him from her mind altogether, having agreed with Miss Marston one day when they were discussing him, that he was a clever man but after all a trifle too self-centered. To tell the truth Mrs. Lennox had been mistaken in her analysis of his character and it annoyed her.

A fortnight after the wedding the Dale girls were devouring with eager eyes one morning a very small note and a very large check which they could scarcely read, so great was their excitement.

“Oh, what a relief!” cried Julie, “to know that everything pleased Mrs. Truxton, and how good she was to write such a kind appreciative note to people like us whom she scarcely knows! Let’s go and read it to Bridget.”

Bridget, when she heard it, was reduced to tears and presently they were all laughing and crying together, for the work of this first big order had been more of an anxiety than any one of them cared to acknowledge, while its success expressed so kindly by their thoughtful customer meant as much in its way as the accompanying check, which fairly dazzled them.

“One hundred and twenty-five dollars!” cried Hester ecstatically. “We’re millionaires! Oh— oh—oh! to think of our earning so much money!” She waved the check wildly over her head and even insisted that Peter Snooks should have a sniff at it before she said, “Wouldn’t you just like to frame it and keep it forever?”

“I know what I should like best of all to do with it,” said Julie.

“I bet Miss Hester can guess by the knowin’ look in her eyes,” said Bridget. “It’s meself that knows too, what your blessed selves is thinkin’.”

“Of course you both know,” Julie said quietly, “we want to begin to pay Dr. Ware rent.”

They went the next afternoon to his office. On the doorsteps they encountered Miss Ware, who turned about as she saw them approach.

“Don’t let us detain you,” said Julie politely, “we have just come for a little business talk with your brother.”

“Ah!” she replied, “I fancied you got about all of that sort of thing you wanted at home. You’d better come upstairs and let me make you some tea—you look peaked, both of you. Philip ought to give you a tonic. Tell him I said so, and come up afterward. I insist upon it and shall have the tea ready. It will not do you any harm to sit down in a different atmosphere for a while. I suppose you do get sick to death of a kitchen.”

There was no doubt that Miss Ware possessed to perfection the faculty of rubbing one the wrong way, but Julie deemed it wise not to decline these overtures and made no further protest against her going in with them.

“Horrid old thing! How I hate her!” whispered Hester, as Miss Ware went on upstairs and they waited a moment in the Doctor’s ante-room.

“So do I, but she’s his sister and she means well.”

“You’d find excuses for the old boy himself.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” laughed Julie, “but—here’s Dr. Ware.”

He bowed to them as he entered from the private office and passed by with an elderly man, with whom he was in deep conversation. In a moment he returned and greeted the girls warmly.

“Well,” he said, giving each a hand, “this is delightful. Come into the other room. That was old Mr. Landor—Kenneth’s father, by the way—did you notice him? He is about half Kenneth’s size, but he has force enough for a dozen men. I wish you girls knew him.”

He pulled out chairs as he talked and ensconced the girls comfortably, then stood against the table facing them with arms folded and the smile on his face which Bridget vowed was “like the blessed sun for warmin’ the cockles of your heart.”

“It is good to have you here,” he said heartily, “I wish you came more often. Perhaps,” with a laugh that showed the gleam of his white teeth, “I do not give you a chance—I go so often to see you.”

“If you came every hour of the day it wouldn’t be too often,” exclaimed Hester, who never loved people by halves. “But Julie is going to do the talking to-day. I intend to keep still.”

“As if you could! Well, Julie?” smiling at her.

“We have come to have a little business talk with you,” she said, twisting her fingers together nervously and finding it a little difficult to begin.

“Delighted to be so honored,” he replied lightly, bowing low.

“It is about the—the rent,” said Julie, who wished her words would not stick in her throat. “We are getting on so well with our work that we want to begin to pay you. We thought if you would let us begin this month and—”

“And not object or scold us or anything,” broke in Hester who never could remain out of a conversation, “but just take the money, we’d feel a thousand times happier, though no money or anything else could ever express our gratitude for all you are doing.”

He still leaned against the table with folded arms but the smile had given place to an expression of sadness.

“Have you both quite finished?” he asked when Hester had stopped for lack of breath.

“We never could finish talking about your kindness,” put in Julie.

The Doctor raised his hand as if to waive that aside. “I have listened to your proposition,” he said, “because I am a practical business man and I understand your spirit. It is the height of your ambition to be independent.”

“Yes,” they assented.

“When your father broke down,” he continued, “I longed to take you all home and look after you. I was amply able to do it and he is my oldest and best friend. I would have done it, too, if you girls had not astonished me by displaying so much courage and such a determination to fight your own battles that I could only stand aside and watch you work out your own salvation.”

“You have made the way easier all the time,” said Julie tremulously.

The Doctor cleared his throat.

“I have been so glad to share a bit of the responsibility, but now my faithful little comrades want to shoulder it all.”

“Oh, Dr. Ware, you don’t think—” began Hester impulsively.

“Yes, I do think,” he interrupted, “that you have the right idea and whatever my personal inclination may be, I like your spirit of independence and it shall be as you say.”

Hester flung her arms about his neck and kissed him. “Do you know,” she said brokenly, “Julie and I are getting so puffed up with conceit over our business prosperity that presently you will disown us altogether.”

“Shall I?” holding her fast. “What do you think, Julie?” with a searching gaze into the face of the older girl who stood a little apart from them.

Julie flushed and turned her eyes away—tell-tale eyes like hers were not to be trusted. “I think,” she said with a supreme effort to speak calmly, “I think we had better go upstairs for tea. Miss Ware will be wondering what has become of us.”

When the Doctor learned that tea was brewing in the library he followed them upstairs and electrified his sister by handing about tea and taking a cup himself with as much complacency as if he were in the habit of dawdling around a tea-table every afternoon of his life. Miss Ware wished he hadn’t come, for she had intended to ply the girls with questions about their work; questions which in the presence of her brother she hesitated to ask, standing, as she did, in considerable awe of him. She did manage, while he was talking to Hester, to catechise Julie a little, but that young woman’s answers were so evasive, yet withal so sweetly polite that Miss Ware felt very much as if she were hitting a rubber ball, which, while showing the imprint of her attack, bounded back every time to the starting point. It happened also that Dr. Ware having some notion of what his sister might be up to, rescued Julie from too prolonged a tÊte-À-tÊte and with infinite tact kept the conversation in such general channels that personalities were forgotten and Miss Ware quite shone in her desire to be agreeable. There are many persons who, given their own conversational way, manage in the course of an hour to reduce to a state of irritation every person in the room, yet who, guided and steered by a stronger force, rise to the best that is in them and produce such a favorable impression that one wonders how one ever thought them other than agreeable. It was thus with Miss Ware, who under the guidance of her brother, appeared to the girls in a new light, and she herself had the unusual sensation of regretting that they had taken so early a departure.

“I wish I had asked them to stay on to dinner,” she said when they had gone.

“I wish you had,” said the Doctor, accustomed to her after thoughts.

“Why didn’t you suggest it?”

“I was not sure that it would be agreeable to you, Mary.”

“Humph!” she said. Then critically, “Hester is extraordinarily pretty—and what an air! She’s almost conspicuous. How is your scheme about Kenneth getting on?”

“It is not a ‘scheme,’ Mary. I wish you would not express it just that way. And I have concluded I am not the right person to go in for match-making. Think no more about it.”

“Humph!” she said again.

“I doubt if either of the girls will care to marry,” he volunteered.

“Girls are queer,” she said sententiously.

“Are they?” he rejoined wearily. “I do not think I know.”