all about it."

"You'll have to manage the bakery and me too, somehow, before--a
'year or so'! How long do you suppose I expect to wait?"

"Dear me! how long _have_ you waited?" returned Ray, demurely.

She only meant the three hours since they had been engaged; but it
is a funny fact about the nature and prerogative of a man, that he
may take years in which to come to the point of asking--years in
which perhaps a woman's life is waiting, with a wear and an
uncertainty in it; but the point of _having_ must be moved up then,
to suit his sudden impatience of full purpose.

A woman shrinks from this hurry; she wants a little of the blessed
time of sure anticipation, after she knows that they belong to one
another; a time to dream and plan beautiful things together in; to
let herself think, safely and rightly, all the thoughts she has had
to keep down until now. It is the difference of attitude in the
asking and answering relations; a man's thoughts have been free
enough all along; he has dreamt his dream out, and stands claiming
the fulfillment.

Dot had her hair all down that night, and her nightgown on, and was
sitting on the bed, with her feet curled up, while Ray stood in
skirts and dressing-sack, before the glass, her braids half
unfastened, stock-still, looking in at herself, or through her own
image, with a most intent oblivion of what she pretended to be there
for.

"Well, Ray! Have you forgotten the way to the other side of your
head, or are you enchanted for a hundred years? I shall want the
glass to-morrow morning."

Ray roused up from her abstraction.

"I was thinking," she said.

"Yes'm. I suppose you'll be always thinking now. You had just
outgrown that trick, a little. It was the affliction of my
childhood; and now it's got to begin again. 'Don't talk, Dot; I'm
thinking.' Good-by."

There was half a whimper in Dorothy's last word.

"Dot! You silly little thing!"

And Rachel came over to the bedside, and put her arms round Dorothy,
all crumpled as she was into a little round white ball.

"I was thinking about Marion Kent."

CHAPTER XVI.

RECOMPENSE.

That night, Marion Kent was fifty miles off, in the great, mixed-up,
manufacturing town of Loweburg.

She had three platform dresses now,--the earnings of some half-dozen
"evenings." The sea-green silk would not do forever, in place after
place; they would call her the mermaid. She must have a quiet,
elegant black one, and one the