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Marriage, she decided, was the only way by which she could score a final victory over her uncle, and at the same time spike his guns; but it did not necessarily follow that her marriage must be with Livingstone. Indeed, as her coolly intelligent mind perceived, marrying an unmanageable young man in order to be free of an unmanageable old one would be simply walking out of the frying-pan into the fire–and that was not at all the resolution of her difficulties that Dorothy sought. The plan that now began to shape itself in her mind was one by which both fire and frying-pan would be successfully avoided; and as the more that she examined into it the more desirable it appeared to her, she lost no time in carrying it into effect–whereby, in less than three days’ time, she sent Mr. Van Rensselaer Livingstone away in such a rage that he put to sea in the very face of a threatening north-easter, and in a much shorter period she caused her uncle seriously to doubt the evidence of his own senses.

At the end of his week of retirement, Mr. Port found himself in the hale condition of a bilious giant refreshed with blue-pills. He looked a little thinner than when he had started upon his ill-starred cruise, and his usual ruddiness was not as yet fully restored; but he was in capital condition, and a good deal more than ready for Miss Lee to come on. He could not very well, in the nature of the case, start an offensive campaign; but at the very first suggestion on Dorothy’s part of the slightest desire to engage again in any of the various forms of frivolous amusement by which she had made his life a burden to him, he was all loaded and primed to go off with a bang that he believed would settle her.

And, such is the perversity of human nature, Mr. Port presently became not a little annoyed by Dorothy’s failure to supply the spark that was to touch him off. In fact, her conduct was bewilderingly strange. She drew away from the lively circle of which Mrs. Rattleton was the animated centre and voluntarily associated herself with the elderly and very respectable Philadelphians whoso acquaintance she previously had so emphatically declined. Still further to Mr. Port’s astonishment, the lady and gentleman especially singled out by Miss Lee as most in accord with her newly-acquired tastes were the severe Mrs. Logan Rittenhouse and that lady’s staid brother, Mr. Pennington Brown.

At the feet of the former, quite literally, she sat as a disciple in crochet; and listened the while with every outward sign of interest to the dull record of South Fourth Street scandals of the past and West Walnut Street scandals of the present which this estimable matron poured into her ears by the hour at a time. And in a quiet corner of the veranda (Mr. Brown’s eyesight having failed a little, so that he found reading rather difficult) she read aloud to the latter from Watson’s Annals; and listened with a pleased satisfaction to his comments upon her selections from this, the Philadelphia Bible, and to the numerous anecdotes of a genealogical and antiquarian cast which thus were recalled to his mind. Possibly the readings from Watson were continued in the afternoons–when Miss Lee and Mr. Brown regularly went down to the Rocks. So extraordinary was all this that Mr. Port admitted frankly to himself that he could make neither head nor tail of it; but he had an inborn conviction that such an unnatural state of affairs was not likely to last There was good Scriptural authority, he called to mind grimly, for the assertion that the leopard did not change his spots nor the Ethiopian his skin.

X.

In accordance with the substantial customs of his fellow-citizens, Mr. Port always returned to Philadelphia sharp on the 1st of September–calmly ignoring the heat and the mosquitoes, which are the dominant characteristics of Philadelphia during that month, and resting secure in the knowledge that the course which he pursued was that which his father and his grandfather had pursued before him. It was on the eve of his departure from Narragansett that his doubts and perplexities occasioned by Dorothy’s surprising conduct were resolved.