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312 "And you want me to—"

"Dear uncle—my own one darling uncle, I want you only to do that which will make you—make you happy. What is Miss Dunstable to me compared to you?" And then she stooped down and kissed him.

The doctor was apparently too much astounded by the intimation given him to make any farther immediate reply. His niece, seeing this, left him that she might go and dress, and when they met again in the drawing-room Frank Gresham was with them.



did not look like a lovelorn maiden, as she stood in a small antechamber at the top of her drawing-room stairs receiving her guests. Her house was one of those abnormal mansions which are to be seen here and there in London, built in compliance rather with the rules of rural architecture than with those which usually govern the erection of city streets and town terraces. It stood back from its brethren, and alone, so that its owner could walk round it. It was approached by a short carriageway; the chief door was in the back of the building; and the front of the house looked on to one of the parks. Miss Dunstable, in procuring it, had had her usual luck. It had been built by an eccentric millionnaire at an enormous cost; and the eccentric millionnaire, after living in it for twelve months, had declared that it did not possess a single comfort, and that it was deficient in most of those details which, in point of house accommodation, are necessary to the very existence of man. Consequently, the mansion was sold, and Miss Dunstable was the purchaser. Cranbourn House it had been named, and its present owner had made no change in this respect; but the world at large very generally called it Ointment Hall, and Miss Dunstable herself as frequently used that name for it as any other. It was impossible to quiz Miss Dunstable with any success, because she always joined in the joke herself.

Not a word farther had passed between Mrs. Gresham and Dr. Thorne on the subject of their last conversation; but the doctor, as he entered the lady's portals among a