This form of address was disconcerting to Mr. Port, for during the period to which Miss Lee referred he certainly had been trying--not very cleverly, perhaps, for such efforts were not at all in his line, but still to the best of his ability--to make himself as agreeable as possible; and the effort on the part of his niece to be angelic, of which she spoke so confidently, he could not but think had fallen rather more than a little short of absolute success. The one ray of comfort that he extracted from Dorothy’s utterance was her reference to herself as his angel; he had come to understand that the use of this term was a sign of fair weather, and he valued it accordingly. But even for the sake of fair weather Mr. Port was not yet prepared to expose his elderly joints to the draughty discomforts of the galleries overhanging the tennis-court; and he said so, pretty decidedly. Almost anything else he was willing to do, he added, but that particular thing he would not do at all. “As you please, Uncle Hutchinson,” Dorothy answered, in a tone of gloomy resignation. “I am used to hearing that. It is just what poor dear mamma used to say. She always was willing, you know, to do everything but the thing that I wanted her to do. I remember, just to mention a single instance, how mamma broke up a delightful water party on Windermere that Sir Gordon Graham had arranged expressly for us. The weather was rather misty, as it is apt to be up there, you know, but nothing worth minding when you are well wrapped up. But mamma said that if she went out in such a drizzle she knew her cough would be ever so much worse--and of course she couldn’t really know that it would be worse, for nobody truly knows what the weather is going to do to them--and so she wouldn’t go. And Sir Gordon was very much hurt about it, and never came near us again. And unless I’m very much mistaken, Uncle Hutchinson, mamma’s selfishness that day lost me the chance of being Lady Graham. So I’m used to being treated in this way, and you needn’t at all mind refusing me everything that I ask.” And, being delivered of this discourse, Miss Lee lapsed into a condition of funereal gloom. At the end of another twenty-four hours Mr. Port knuckled under. “I have been thinking, Dorothy,” he said, “about what you were saying about tennis. It’s a beastly game, but since you insist upon seeing it I’ll take you for a little while this afternoon.” This was not the most gracious form of words in which an invitation could be couched; but Dorothy, who was not a stickler for forms provided she was successful in results, accepted it with alacrity. Later in the day, as they returned from the Casino, she declared: