At the end of his week of retirement, Mr. Port found himself in the hale condition of a bilious giant refreshed with blue-pills. He looked a little thinner than when he had started upon his ill-starred cruise, and his usual ruddiness was not as yet fully restored; but he was in capital condition, and a good deal more than ready for Miss Lee to come on. He could not very well, in the nature of the case, start an offensive campaign; but at the very first suggestion on Dorothy’s part of the slightest desire to engage again in any of the various forms of frivolous amusement by which she had made his life a burden to him, he was all loaded and primed to go off with a bang that he believed would settle her. And, such is the perversity of human nature, Mr. Port presently became not a little annoyed by Dorothy’s failure to supply the spark that was to touch him off. In fact, her conduct was bewilderingly strange. She drew away from the lively circle of which Mrs. Rattleton was the animated centre and voluntarily associated herself with the elderly and very respectable Philadelphians whoso acquaintance she previously had so emphatically declined. Still further to Mr. Port’s astonishment, the lady and gentleman especially singled out by Miss Lee as most in accord with her newly-acquired tastes were the severe Mrs. Logan Rittenhouse and that lady’s staid brother, Mr. Pennington Brown. [Illustration: The severe Mrs. Logan Rittenhouse 074] At the feet of the former, quite literally, she sat as a disciple in crochet; and listened the while with every outward sign of interest to the dull record of South Fourth Street scandals of the past and West Walnut Street scandals of the present which this estimable matron poured into her ears by the hour at a time. And in a quiet corner of the veranda (Mr. Brown’s eyesight having failed a little, so that he found reading rather difficult) she read aloud to the latter from _Watson’s Annals_; and listened with a pleased satisfaction to his comments upon her selections from this, the Philadelphia Bible, and to the numerous anecdotes of a genealogical and antiquarian cast which thus were recalled to his mind. Possibly the readings from _Watson_ were continued in the afternoons--when Miss Lee and Mr. Brown regularly went down to the Rocks. So extraordinary was all this that Mr. Port admitted frankly to himself that he could make neither head nor tail of it; but he had an inborn conviction that such an unnatural state of affairs was not likely to last There was good Scriptural authority, he called to mind grimly, for the assertion that the leopard did not change his spots nor the Ethiopian his skin. X.