Washington he was so deep in
love that he began to consider his own unworthiness, and to wonder
whether she might ever be induced to care for him a little--ever so
little."

"I don't think that is so marvelous a thing," said Dear Jones, glancing
at Baby Van Rensselaer.

"Who was she?" asked the Duchess, who had once lived in Philadelphia.

"She was Miss Kitty Sutton, of San Francisco, and she was a daughter of
old Judge Sutton, of the firm of Pixley & Sutton."

"A very respectable family," assented the Duchess.

"I hope she wasn't a daughter of that loud and vulgar old Mrs. Sutton
whom I met at Saratoga one summer four or five years ago?" said Dear
Jones.

"Probably she was," Uncle Larry responded.

"She was a horrid old woman. The boys used to call her Mother Gorgon."

"The pretty Kitty Sutton with whom Eliphalet Duncan had fallen in love
was the daughter of Mother Gorgon. But he never saw the mother, who was
in Frisco, or Los Angeles, or Santa Fe, or somewhere out West, and he
saw a great deal of the daughter, who was up in the White Mountains. She
was traveling with her brother and his wife, and as they journeyed from
hotel to hotel Duncan went with them, and filled out the quartette.
Before the end of the summer he began to think about proposing. Of
course he had lots of chances, going on excursions as they were every
day. He made up his mind to seize the first opportunity, and that very
evening he took her out for a moonlight row on Lake Winipiseogee. As he
handed her into the boat he resolved to do it, and he had a glimmer of
suspicion that she knew he was going to do it, too."

"Girls," said Dear Jones, "never go out in a rowboat at night with a
young man unless you mean to accept him."

"Sometimes it's best to refuse him, and get it over once for all," said
Baby Van Rensselaer, impersonally.

"As Eliphalet took the oars he felt a sudden chill. He tried to shake it
off, but in vain. He began to have a growing consciousness of impending
evil. Before he had taken ten strokes--and he was a swift oarsman--he
was aware of a mysterious presence between him and Miss Sutton."

"Was it the guardian-angel ghost warning him off the match?" interrupted
Dear Jones.

"That's just what it was," said Uncle Larry. "And he yielded to it, and
kept his peace, and rowed Miss Sutton back to the hotel with his
proposal unspoken."

"More fool he," said Dear Jones. "It will take more than one ghost to
keep me from propo