e with Livingstone.
Indeed, as her coolly intelligent mind perceived, marrying an
unmanageable young man in order to be free of an unmanageable old one
would be simply walking out of the frying-pan into the fire--and that
was not at all the resolution of her difficulties that Dorothy sought.
The plan that now began to shape itself in her mind was one by which
both fire and frying-pan would be successfully avoided; and as the more
that she examined into it the more desirable it appeared to her, she
lost no time in carrying it into effect--whereby, in less than three
days' time, she sent Mr. Van Rensselaer Livingstone away in such a rage
that he put to sea in the very face of a threatening north-easter, and
in a much shorter period she caused her uncle seriously to doubt the
evidence of his own senses.

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 t