And yet there was no blushing progress to the love-making! Dorothy's behavior was unaccountable.

The first evening she sat in marble silence, like an image.

The next, she would not come down to dinner, saying she was sick and could not eat.

The invalid put in a most successful evening in her room, thinking of Richard, and gorging on miscellaneous dishes which her sable maid abstracted from below.

She would have been ill the third time, but her mother set her face like flint against such excuse.