“Yes, Hutch, I love her with all my heart; and what has made me so nervous to-night is the great happiness that has come to me--it only came positively this afternoon--and the dread that perhaps, as her guardian, you know, you might not approve of what we have decided to do. But you do approve, don’t you, Hutch? Of course, in a few months she will be her own mistress, and your consent to our marriage, as she very truly says, then will be unnecessary. But even a month seems a desperately long while to wait; and that is the very shortest time, she thinks, in which she could get ready--though the dear child has consented to wait for most of the little things which she wants until we get on the other side.” Mr. Port smiled cynically at the announcement of this concession. It struck him that when Dorothy was turned loose among the Paris shops, backed by the capacious purse of a doting elderly husband, she would mow a rather startlingly broad swath. “So you won’t oppose our marriage, will you, old man? You will consent to my having this dear young creature for my wife?” Various emotions found place in Mr. Port’s breast as he listened to this extraordinary declaration and appeal. At first he felt a lively anger at Dorothy for having, as he coarsely phrased it in his own mind, so successfully gammoned Mr. Pennington Brown; to this succeeded an involuntary admiration of the clever way in which she had managed it; and then a feeling of profound satisfaction possessed him as there came into his slow-moving mind a realizing sense of his own deliverance. But Mr. Port was not so utterly selfish but that, in the midst of the sunrise of happiness which dawned upon him with the opening of a way by which he decently could get rid of Dorothy, he was assailed by certain qualms of conscience as to the unfairness of thus casting upon his old friend the burden that he had found so hard to bear. For the heaviness of Mr. Port’s mental processes prevented him from perceiving, as a shrewder person would have perceived, that Dorothy was not the sort of young woman to engage in an enterprise of this nature without first fully counting the cost. Had he been keener of penetration he would have known that she could be trusted, when safely landed in the high estate of matrimony, to play on skilfully the game that she had so skilfully begun; that in her own interest she would manage matters in such a way as never to arouse in the mind of her elderly husband the awkward suspicion that the scheme of life arranged by his angel apparently with a view solely to his own comfort really was arranged only for the comfort of her angelic self.