"Couldn't she have left her letter until to-morrow?" asked Garth, half laughing, but the little subterfuge secretly displeased him. Why should his favorite be banished to that dreary schoolroom? and why should Flo be set to watch her father's slumbers? "I don't like the look of this at all," he muttered to himself, and again that allusion to Circe crossed his mind. "Come and sit down," exclaimed Dora, with playful petulance. "Never mind Beattie's whim, girls will have their own way, and she does not mean to be rude; and now tell me, sir, why you have been so cool all this time, and treated me so shabbily?" He was in for it now he saw, but he feigned to misunderstand her. "How have I treated you shabbily?" he asked, with a tolerable assumption of innocence. There was an ominous flash in Dora's blue eyes, but she answered him gently and plaintively. "Why, in your letters, to be sure; they were as brief and cold as possible, not a trace of the old friendship, not even a regret at my long absence. They deserved to be burnt, every one of them, but I hadn't the heart," dropping her voice and looking at him with dangerous sweetness. "I wish you had," he returned coolly, for he was in no mood for this sort of thing. Another time all this might have pleased and allured him; he might have been faithful in his allegiance to Queenie, and yet have taken a certain pleasure in watching her and listening to her reproaches. She was such a picturesque little creature, and there was something so sweetly seductive in her manners to him, that he would not have been a man and not felt the power of her fascination; but the memory of his past tenderness for her was now a source of regret to him, and he was too much shattered by the storm that had swept over him to amuse himself with aimless love-making. "I wish you would destroy all my letters, Miss Cunningham," he went on, gravely; and then he remembered that he had not yet told her about the failure of his fortunes. He touched on it now, but lightly, and she listened with the deepest interest. "Poor Mr. Clayton, how shocking to lose all that money! I am so grieved about it, and you never told me about that either!" with reproachful tenderness, and the mistiness he had before noticed gathered slowly to her eyes. "There is something else I have not told you," he continued, taking his resolution suddenly, and determined to put a stop, at all risks, to this dangerous softness; "but then, to be sure, I have only just known it myself. Have you heard that our school-mistress, Miss Marriott, has come into a large fortune?" "Why no!" she returned, very much startled and becoming a little pale. "It is a whim of hers hiding it from all of us as she has done. Why, she was a rich woman when you first made her acquaintance! I call it a tidy little fortune, five thousand a-year."