“Ought I to call her aunt?” Dora said. “I suppose so indeed, if she is my mother’s sister.” “Certainly you should, and you have a right; but I only because she allows me, because they wished it, to make me feel no stranger in the house. My poor dear aunt is very ill--worse, they say, than she has ever been before.” “Ill?” Dora seemed to find no words except these interjections that she could say. “I hope perhaps they may be deceived. The doctors don’t know her constitution. I think I have seen her just as bad and come quite round again. But even Miller is frightened: she may be worse than I think, and she has the greatest, the most anxious desire to see you, as she says, before she dies.” “Dies?” cried Dora. “But how can she die when she has only just come home?” “That is what I feel, too,” cried the young man, with eagerness. “But perhaps,” he added, “it is no real reason; for doesn’t it often happen that people break down just at the moment when they come in sight of what they have wished for for years and years?” “I don’t know,” said Dora, recovering her courage. “I have not heard of things so dreadful as that. I can’t imagine that it could be permitted to be; for things don’t happen just by chance, do they? They are,” she added quite inconclusively, “as father says, all in the day’s work.” “I don’t know either,” said young Gordon; “but very cruel things do happen. However, there is nothing in the world she wishes for so much as you. Will you come to her? I am sure that you have never been out of her mind for years. She used to talk to me about you. It was our secret between us two. I think that was the chief thing that made her take to me as she did, that she might have some one to speak to about Dora. I used to wonder what you were at first,--an idol, or a prodigy, or a princess.” “You must have been rather disgusted when you found I was only a girl,” Dora cried, in spite of herself. He looked at her with a discriminative gaze, not uncritical, yet full of warm light that seemed to linger and brighten somehow upon her, and which, though Dora was looking straight before her, without a glance to the right or left, or any possibility of catching his eye, she perceived, though without knowing how. “No,” he said, with a little embarrassed laugh, “quite the reverse, and always hoping that one day we might be friends.”