“Perhaps,” she said. “And while you relished them in London, did you give thought to what I did at home?” “You? To what you did? What did you do?” Sir Harry was flabbergasted at her question. “I was at home, Sir Harry.” She spoke without bitterness, without emphasis, and when he looked sharply at her, she seemed to interpret the look as an invitation and rose. “My mother, I think, is ready to accompany us if you care to take me walking in the Park.” Decidedly a check to a gentleman who proposed to make up for past delays by a whirlwind wooing. She was at home, while he ruffled it in London. And where else should she be? What did she imply? At any rate, she had embarrassed him by the unexpectedness of her attack. Of course she was at home, and of course he was a reveler in London. He was man, she woman, and he hoped she recognized the elementary distinction. Whatever her object, whether she had the incredible audacity to accuse him--him, open-handed Harry--of something only to be defined as meanness, or whether she was only being witty with him, she had certainly discouraged the declaration he came to make. Mrs. Vemers found him a moody squire of dames in the Park, while his sudden puzzlement gave Dorothy a mischievously happy promenade. He brought them, after the shortest of walks, to their door. “You have been very silent, Sir Harry,” Mrs. Verners told him, with her incurable habit of stating the obvious. “Are you not well to-day?” “Perfectly, I thank you, Madam.” “Oh, Lud, mother, it is but that you do not appreciate Sir Harry’s capacity for disguise. In the past, he has been--many things. To-day we are to admire him in the character of a thunderstorm.” “Indeed?” he said. “Thunderstorms break.” “But not on me,” said Dorothy, and ran into the house. Sir Harry turned away with the scantest bow to Mrs. Verners. This was a new flavor and he wanted to taste it well, to make sure that he approved a Dorothy who could be a precipitate hoyden rushing out-of-doors to an injured kitten and a woman of wit that stabbed him shrewdly. She had variety, this Dorothy; she wasn’t the makings of a dull, complacent wife. Well, and did he want dullness and complacency? He was going to Lancashire, to a life that a Whitworth must live as an example to others: there was to be nothing to demand a wife’s complacency. And as to dullness, heaven save him from it--and heaven seemed, by making Dorothy Verners, to have answered that prayer. He decided to be more in love with Dorothy than before--which, as she wasn’t willing to fly into his arms when he crooked a beckoning finger, was only natural; and went into a shop from which he might express to her the warmth of his sentiment at an appropriate cost. She should see if he was mean!