Ray laughed.  “Haven’t I told you?  I thought everybody knew.  It’s too long a story for the door-step.  When you come again”—­

“That’ll be to-morrow.”

“I’ll tell you 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 color of her hair, like that she had seen the pretty actress, Alice Craike, so bewitching in.  She could deepen it with chestnut trimmings, all toning up together to one rich, bright harmony.  Her hair was “blond cendre,”—­not the red-golden of Alice Craike’s; but the same subtle rule of art was available; “cafe-au-lait” was her shade; and the darker velvet just deepened and emphasized the effect.