occasions when he had opportunities for observation he noted the skill with which she managed them, as well as the chivalry with which they treated her; and yet there was in the situation an indefinable element that displeased him.  It was something of a shock to learn that the flower he thought he was cultivating in secluded sweetness under glass had taken root of its own accord in the midst of young New York’s great, gay parterre.  Aware of the possibilities of this soil to produce over-stimulated growth, he could think of nothing better than to pluck it up and, temporarily at least, transplant it elsewhere.  Having come to the decision overnight, he made the proposition when they met at breakfast in the morning.

A prettier object than Miss Dorothea Pruyn, at the head of her father’s table, it would have been difficult to find in the whole range of “dainty rogues in porcelain.”  From the top of her bronze-colored hair to the tip of her bronze-colored shoes she was as complete as taste could make her.  The flash of her eyes as she lifted them suddenly, and as suddenly dropped them, over her task among the coffee-cups was like that of summer waters; while the rapture of youth was in her smile, and a becoming school-girl shyness in her fleeting blushes.  In the floral language of American society, she was “not a bud”; she was only that small, hard, green thing out of which the bud is to unfold itself, but which does not lack a beauty of promise specially its own.  If any criticism could be passed upon her, it was that which her father made—­that there was danger of the promise being anticipated by a rather premature fulfilment, and the flower that needed time forced into a hurried, hot-house bloom.

“What!  And leave my friends!” she exclaimed, when Derek, with some hesitation, had asked her how she would like the journey.

“They would keep.”

“That’s just what they wouldn’t do.  When I came back I should find them in all sorts of new combinations, out of which I should be dropped.  You’ve got to be on the spot to keep in your set, otherwise you’re lost.”

“Why should you be in a set?  Why shouldn’t you be independent?”

“That just shows how much you understand, father,” she said, pityingly.  “A girl who isn’t in a set is as much an outsider as a Hindoo who isn’t in a caste.  I must know people; and I must know the right people; and I must know no one but the right people.  It’s perfectly simple.”

“Oh, perfectly.  I can’t help wondering, though, how you recognize the right people when you see them.”

“By instinct.  You couldn’t make a mistake about that, any more than one pigeon could make a mistake about another, or take it for a crow.”

“And is young Wappinger one of the right people?”

It was with an effort that Derek made up his mind to broach this subject, but Dorothea’s self-possession was not disturbed.

“Certainly,” she replied, briefly, with perhaps a slight accentuation of her maiden dignity.