“For we could never meet--never, never!” cried the lady, with her head on Dora’s breast--“never, unless perhaps one of us were dying. I could never look him in the face, though perhaps if I were dying---- Dora, kiss your poor--your poor, poor--relation. Oh, my child! oh, my darling! kiss me as that!” “Dear aunt,” said Dora quietly. She spoke in a very subdued tone, in order to keep down the quite uncalled-for excitement and almost passion in the other’s voice. She could not but feel that her new relation was a person with very little self-control, expressing herself far too strongly, with repetitions and outcries quite uncalled for in ordinary conversation, and that it was her, Dora’s, business to exercise a mollifying influence. “This is for you,” she said, touching the sallow, thin cheek with her young rosy lips. “And this is for poor mamma--poor young mamma, whom I never saw.” The lady gave a quick cry, and clutched the girl in her trembling arms. CHAPTER X. The meeting with her new relation had a great effect upon Dora’s mind. It troubled her, though there was no reason in the world why the discovery that her mother had a sister, and she herself an aunt, should be painful. An aunt is not a very interesting relation generally, not enough to make a girl’s heart beat; but it added a complication to the web of altogether new difficulties in which Dora found herself entangled. Everything had been so simple in the old days--those dear old days now nearly three months off, before Mr. Mannering fell ill, to which now Dora felt herself go back with such a sense of happiness and ease, perhaps never to be known again. Then everything had been above board: there had been no payments to make that were not made naturally by her father, the fountainhead of everything, who gave his simple orders, and had them fulfilled, and provided for every necessity. Now Dora feared a knock at the door of his room lest it should be some indiscreet messenger bringing direct a luxury or novelty which it had been intended to smuggle in so that he might not observe it, or introduce with some one’s compliments as an accidental offering to the sick man. To hurry off Janie or Molly downstairs with these good things intended to tempt the invalid’s appetite, to stamp a secret foot at the indiscretions of Jane, who would bring in the bill for these dainties, or announce their arrival loud out, rousing Mr. Mannering to inquiries, and give a stern order that such extravagances should be no more, were now common experiences to Dora. She had to deceive him, which was, Miss Bethune assured her, for his good, but which Dora felt with a sinking heart was not at all for her own good, and made her shrink from her father’s eye. To account for the presence of some rare wine which was good for him by a little story which, though it had been carefully taught her by Dr. Roland or Miss Bethune, was not true--to make out that