cceeded 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.

It was while Mr. Port wavered among his qualms of conscience, hesitating
between his great longing to chuck Dorothy overboard, and so have
done with her, and his sense of duty to Mr. Pennington Brown, that the
subject of his perplexities herself appeared upon the scene; and
her arrival at so critical a juncture seemed to suggest as a remote
possibility that she had been all the while snuffing this particular
battle from not very far off.

"Dear Uncle Hutchinson," said Miss Lee, with affectionate fervor,
"do you think that your angel is most cruel and horrid because she is
willing to go off in this way after her own selfish happiness and leave
you all alone? But she won't do it, dear, if you would rather have her
stay. Her only wish, you know, has been to make you comfortable and
happy; and you have been so good and so kind to her that she is ready to
sacrifice even her love for your sake. Yes, if you would rather keep
her to yourself she will stay. Only if she does stay," and there was a
warning tone of deep meaning in Miss Lee's well-modulated voice, "her
heart, of course, will be broken, and she will have to ask you to travel"
with her for