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Rh tone somewhat at variance with his "only," "he shan't, at any rate, resist her!" This announcement would have quickened a spectator's interest in the young lady whom Chivers now introduced and followed, a young lady who straightway found herself the subject of traditionary discipline. "I've waited. What do you mean?"

Cora Prodmore, who had a great deal of colour in her cheeks and a great deal more—a bold variety of kinds—in the extremely high pitch of her new, smart clothes, meant, on the whole, it was easy to see, very little, and met this challenge with still less show of support either from the sources I have mentioned or from any others. A dull, fresh, honest, overdressed damsel of two-and-twenty, she was too much out of breath, too much flurried and frightened, to do more than stammer: "Waited, papa? Oh, I'm sorry!"

Her regret appeared to strike her father still more as an impertinence than as a vanity. "Would you then, if I had not had patience for you, have wished not to find me? Why the dickens are you so late?"

Agitated, embarrassed, the girl was at a loss. "I'll tell you, papa!" But she followed up her pledge with an air of vacuity and then, dropping