From the first moment of Walter’s entry, Dolly was dimly aware, womanlike, of something amiss, something altered in his manner.  Not, indeed, that her lover was less affectionate or less tender than usual,—­if anything he seemed rather more so; but his talk was embarrassed, pre-occupied, spasmodic.  He spoke by fits and starts, and seemed to hold back something.  Dolly taxed him with it at last.  Walter tried to put it off upon her approaching departure.  But he was an honest young man, and so bad an actor that Dolly, with her keen feminine intuitions, at once detected him.  “It’s more than that,” she said, all regret, leaning forward with a quick-gathering moisture in her eye, for she really loved him.  “It’s more than that, Walter.  You’ve heard something somewhere that you don’t want to tell me.”

Walter’s color changed at once.  He was a man, and therefore but a poor dissembler.  “Well, nothing very much,” he admitted, awkwardly.

Dolly, drew back like one stung; her heart beat fast.  “What have you heard?” she cried trembling; “Walter, Walter, I love you!  You must keep nothing back.  Tell me now what it is.  I can bear to hear it.”

The young man hesitated.  “Only something my step-father heard from a friend last night,” he replied, floundering deeper and deeper.  “Nothing at all about you, darling.  Only—­well—­about your family.”

Dolly’s face was red as fire.  A lump rose in her throat; she started in horror.  Then he had found out the Truth.  He had probed the Mystery.

“Something that makes you sorry you promised to marry me?” she cried aloud in her despair.  Heaven faded before her eyes.  What evil trick could mamma have played her?

As she stood there that moment—­proud, crimson, breathless—­Walter Brydges would have married her if her father had been a tinker and her mother a gipsy girl.  He drew her toward him tenderly.  “No, darling,” he cried, kissing her, for he was a chivalrous young man, as he understood chivalry; and to him it was indeed a most cruel blow to learn that his future wife was born out of lawful wedlock.  “I’m proud of you; I love you.  I worship the very ground your sweet feet tread on.  Nothing on earth could make me anything but grateful and thankful for the gift of your love you’re gracious enough to bestow on me.”

But Dolly drew back in alarm.  Not on such terms as those.  She, too, had her pride; she, too, had her chivalry.  “No, no,” she cried, shrinking.  “I don’t know what it is.  I don’t know what it means.  But till I’ve gone home to London and asked about it from mother,—­oh, Walter, we two are no longer engaged.  You are free from your promise.”

She said it proudly; she said it bravely.  She said it with womanly grace and dignity.  Something of Herminia shone out in her that moment.  No man should ever take her—­to the grandest home—­unless he took her at her full worth, pleased and proud to win her.