“How very kind you are, Mr. Livingstone,” Dorothy hastened to say, in order to head off her uncle’s inevitable refusal. “Of course we will go, with the greatest possible pleasure. It is very odd how things fall out sometimes. Now only this morning I was begging Uncle Hutchinson to take me off yachting, and he was saying how much he enjoyed being at sea, and how he really thought that if it wasn’t for his age--wasn’t it absurd of him to talk about his age? He is not old at all, the dear!--he would have a yacht of his own. And almost before the words are fairly out of our mouths here you drop from the clouds, or are cast up by the sea, it’s all the same thing, and give us both just what we have been longing for. At least, Uncle Hutchinson pretended to be longing for it only in case he could be young enough to enjoy it; but if he doesn’t think he’s young now, I’d like to know what he’ll call himself when he’s fifty!” And then, facing around sharply upon her uncle, Dorothy concluded: “The idea of pretending that _you_ are too old to go yachting! Really, Uncle Hutchinson, I am ashamed of you!” As has been intimated, if there was any one subject upon which Mr. Port was especially sensitive, it was the subject of his age. As the parish register of St. Peter’s all too plainly proved, he never would see sixty again; but this awkward record was in an out-of-the-way place, and the agreeable fiction that he advanced in various indirect ways to the effect that he was a trifle turned of forty-seven was not likely to be officially contradicted. And it is not impossible, so tenacious was he upon this point, that had the official proof been produced, he would have denied its authenticity. For it was Mr. Port’s firm determination still to figure before the world as a youngish, middle-aged man. To say that Miss Lee deliberately set herself to playing upon this weakness of her guardian’s, possibly, remotely possibly, would be doing her injustice. But the fact is obvious that she succeeded by her cleverly turned discourse in landing her esteemed relative fairly between the horns of an exceedingly awkward dilemma: either Mr. Port must accept the invitation and be horribly ill, or he must reject it, and so throw over his pretensions to elderly youth.