“You have said that before,” said Dolly, rather hard-heartedly; but in spite of it she did not refuse to let him be as affectionate as he chose when he knelt down by her chair, as he did the next minute. “It would be a great deal better for me,” she half whispered, breaking the suspicious silence that followed,--“it would be a great deal better for _me_ if I did not care for you half so much;” and yet at the same time she leaned a trifle more toward him in the most traitorous of half-coaxing, half-reproachful ways. “It would be the death of _me_,” said Griffith; and he at once plunged into an eloquently persuasive dissertation upon the height and depth and breadth and force of his love for her. He was prone to such dissertations, and always ready with one to improve any occasion; and I am compelled to admit that, far from checking him, Dolly rather liked them, and was given to encourage and incite him to their delivery. When this one was ended, he was quite in the frame of mind to listen to reason, and let her enter into particulars concerning her morning's efforts, which she did, at length, only adding a flavor of the mysterious up to the introduction of Miss MacDowlas. “What!” cried out Griffith, when she let out the secret. “Confound it! No! Not Aunt MacDowlas in the flesh, Dolly? You are joking.” “No,” answered Dolly, shaking her head at the amazed faces of the girls, who had come in during the recital, and who had been guilty of the impropriety of all exclaiming at once when the climax was reached. “I am in earnest. I am engaged as companion to no less a person than Miss Berenice MacDowlas.” “Why, it is like something out of a three-volumed novel,” said Mollie. “It is a good joke,” said 'Toinette. “It is very awkward,” commented Aimée. “If she finds out you are engaged to Griffith, she will think it so indiscreet of you both that she will cut him off with a shilling.” “Indiscreet!” echoed Dolly. “So we are indiscreet, my sage young friend,--but indiscretion is like variety, it is the spice of life.” And by this brisk speech she managed to sweep away the shadow which had touched Griffith's face, at the unconscious hint at their lack of wisdom. “Don't say such a thing again,” she said to Aimée afterward, when they were talking the matter over, as they always talked things over together, “or he will fancy that you share his own belief that he has something to reproach himself with. Better to be indiscreet than to love one another less.” “A great deal better,” commented the wise one of the family, oracularly. She was not nineteen yet, this wise one, but she was a great comfort and help to Dolly, and indeed to all of them. “And it is n't _my_ way to blame you, either, Dolly, though things _do_ look so entangled. _I_ never advised you to give it up, you know.”