"Oh, this is too bad," she exclaimed, clasping her hands nervously. "Cannot one do a little kindness in return for so much without having unworthy motives imputed to one? Why do you come and say such things to me?" turning on her tormentor with sudden anger and impatience. "It is no business of yours; it is nothing to you if people will say untrue things of me." "You are quite wrong there; it is my business," returned Dora quietly. She did not like her work, but, all the same, she must go through with it. "It is just this--that is my business," she repeated, and her face looked worn and irritable in the firelight. "Miss Marriott, you must know--you cannot have been so much with Langley and Cathy and not know that Garth Clayton and I belong to each other." Then a sudden coldness crept over Queenie. "You--you are not engaged to him," she said at length, and her voice sounded strange to herself; the horror of such an announcement almost took her breath away. "But it could not be true!" she said to herself, "it could not be true!" "It is my own fault that we are not engaged," returned Dora, speaking in a tone of plaintive regret. "I have put him off time after time, and would not allow him to settle it; the girls were too young, and I could not leave papa, that was what I told him. Why, just before I went to Brussels last autumn he came to us, and wanted me then to settle it, poor fellow, and I would not listen to him." "He spoke to you, then?" the numbness creeping over her again. "Yes; he said it must be yea, yea, or nay, nay, between us, I remember his words quite well; and when I would not give him a positive answer he got angry and left me. He has never been himself with me since, and has made me, oh, so unhappy; but I know the reason for it now, Miss Marriott," fixing her blue eyes piteously on her. "Why have you come between us and tried to steal away his heart from poor me?" "Miss Cunningham!" her cheeks burning at the accusation. "Why have you lent him all that money, and tried to decoy his affections? He is not the same to me, and you are the cause. We are two women, and he cannot marry us both; and--and he belongs to me," finished Dora, with a genuine quiver in her voice. Poor bewildered Queenie could make nothing of it. "He cannot belong to you if you are not engaged, and if you have sent him from you," she said, looking helplessly at Dora; and indeed she was so heartsick and stupefied that she hardly knew what she said. If he had spoken to Dora, as she averred, how could he have come and looked at her the next night in the way he did, when she knelt on the rug, with the plate of cakes in her hand, in the gloaming? "It was duty, not I, that sent him away, he owns that," returned Dora, sighing, but her conscience smote her as she uttered this little fib.