. But as the worm will turn, the exclamation was emphatic and
indignant enough. "Well!" she cried, in utter amazement and incipient
rebellion. "Well!" and she returned the challenging gaze of the circle
with a counter-challenge, before which all eyes except Annie's fell.

Annie had the audacity to look Dora in the face and echo the "Well!"
nay, to say further, "You never heard of anything so disgraceful as for
us to turn upon you and find fault with you for refusing Tom Robinson,
when all the time it was we who laughed at him, and scouted his shop,
keeping you up to the point of dismissing him without delay? Quite true,
Dora, dear; but then it was you, and not _us_, whom he was proposing to
marry! and a girl old enough to receive such a proposal should have the
wit to judge for herself--should she not? She ought to cultivate the
penetration to look beneath the surface in so important a matter, and
then fewer lamentable mistakes would be made. However, nobody could
expect you to put force on your inclinations, and he does not bear you
malice."

Annie did not regard her share in the matter so cheerfully and lightly
when she was in the privacy of a ward of St. Ebbe's, where she had
begged to sit up with an unconscious patient, just to keep her hand in
and compose her feelings.

"What mischievous little wretches we were," she reflected, as she
deftly changed the wet cloth on the sick woman's hot forehead. "How
happy he might have made Dora, and how happy she might have made him!
She is so single-minded and tender-hearted, that she could hardly have
failed to see his merits, if we had given him the chance, let her
alone, and left the pair to themselves. Then, if the worst were to
come to the worst," and Annie frowned with anxiety and grief, as well
as with wholesome humiliation, "if poor father and mother cannot get
along, and none of us girls can help them effectually, his house might
have been their home, where he would never have let them feel other
than honoured guests. He would have been a son to them. But the
mischief is done, and there is no help for it. If Dora and he were an
ordinary couple, it might be mended; but now she will not look at him
when we none of us have a penny, because she refused him when we were
in comfortable circumstances; and he will not renew his suit with the
thought in his mind that it would look and feel to her as if any
favour he has magnanimously conferred on us, were a mere bribe to
com