Two or three days later Dorothy advanced her second parallel. In the interval they had bathed every morning and had driven to the Point every afternoon, and they had held converse upon the veranda of the hotel every evening until ten o’clock with certain eminently respectable people from Philadelphia, by whom Dorothy was bored, as she did not hesitate to confess, almost to desperation. Further, Mr. Port had given a lunch-party to which these same Philadelphians were invited; and his niece had informed him, when the festivity was at an end, that if he did anything like that again she certainly would either run away or drown herself. Any trials in this world or any dangers in the next, she declared, were preferable to sitting opposite to such a person as Mrs. Logan Rittenhouse, who talked nothing but uninteresting scandal and crochet, and next to Mr. Pennington Brown, who talked only about peoples’ great-grandfathers and great-aunts. It was with a lively alarm that Mr. Port noted these signs of discontent, together with returning symptoms of the grumpiness which had disturbed his comfort and digestion at Saratoga; and it was most selfishly in his own self-interest that he tried to think of something that would afford his niece amusement. Miss Lee, when she perceived that her intelligently laid plans were working successfully, was graciously pleased to assist him. “It is a great pity, Uncle Hutchinson,” she vouchsafed to remark on the fourth day of suppressed domestic sunshine, “that you don’t like tennis. Don’t you think, for your angel’s sake, that you could go for just a little while this afternoon? There’s going to be a capital match this afternoon, and your angel does so want to see it. You haven’t been very--very agreeable the past two or three days, you dear, and I fear that your liver must be a little out of order. Really, you haven’t given your angel a single chance to be affectionate--and unless she can be affectionate and sweet and clinging, and things like that, you know, your poor angel is not happy at all. Suppose we try the tennis for just half an hour or so? It won’t be much of a sacrifice for you, and it will make your angel so happy that she will make herself dearer to you than ever, you precious thing.”