“She was very ceremonious, certainly, deferring our meeting until dinner,” he thought, with unconscious pique. “I hope she has not been brought up with exaggerated notions of her importance as an heiress. How ridiculous that would make me appear before my friends, who already consider me a martyr!” He went down stairs, where he found his aunt waiting primly in the large, seldom used parlor, which had been lighted and warmed in honor of his coming. A sensation of pleasure came over him as he entered the handsomely furnished room, and realized that he was master of all this elegance and luxury. He glanced around for the girl, the gift of whose small white hand had conferred it all upon him, but she was not visible. “Nina is not down yet, but it is not many minutes to dinner, so she cannot delay her coming much longer,” said Miss Drusilla, interpreting his glance. He took his stand on the hearth-rug and waited with his back to the glowing fire that the inclement March evening rendered necessary. “It is very strange that you missed meeting her this evening,” pursued the old maid, reflectively. “Every day for years she and Lion have gone down to the wharf to see if the boat brought you home, and she was as punctual as usual this time.” “I missed her, at all events,” said stupid Talbot Strangemore. “There was no one at the landing, and I met no one on the way to Selwyn Heights except a beautiful young lady with a black dog.” Miss Drusilla regarded him as scornfully as if he had been a fool or a madman. “Why, you simpleton”--she was beginning, tartly, when she was interrupted by the opening of a door. A tall, white figure glided into the room. “Mrs. Strangemore!” announced Miss Drusilla, maliciously, and she immediately retired from the room, leaving husband and wife alone and face to face. “I must be dreaming,” Talbot Strangemore said to himself, for here in the center of the room gazing fixedly at him, was the lovely girl he had encountered on the sands that evening, only that the warm red merino had been exchanged for a soft, clinging white robe with misty laces and multitudinous knots and loops of silvery white satin ribbon, while Kitty who had been intent on making her mistress look as bride-like as possible, had actually rifled the orange trees in the conservatory of their costly blooms and adorned her so that the folds of her dress and the loose veil of her golden hair exhaled the delicious fragrance of real orange blossoms as she moved slowly across the room to greet the handsome man who gazed at her in perplexity a moment, and then advanced to meet her, catching both her white hands in his as he said, with a tender intonation: “Can this really be Nina, my little child-bride grown so beautiful and womanly?” “Yes, it is Nina,” she replied, but when he bent down to kiss her curved red lips, she crested her golden head in haughty refusal.