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At the end of another twenty-four hours Mr. Port knuckled under. “I have been thinking, Dorothy,” he said, “about what you were saying about tennis. It’s a beastly game, but since you insist upon seeing it I’ll take you for a little while this afternoon.” This was not the most gracious form of words in which an invitation could be couched; but Dorothy, who was not a stickler for forms provided she was successful in results, accepted it with alacrity. Later in the day, as they returned from the Casino, she declared:

“Your angel has had a lovely afternoon, Uncle Hutchinson, and she is sure that you have had a lovely afternoon too. And now that you’ve found what fun there is in looking at tennis, we’ll go every day, won’t we, dear? Sometimes, you know, you are just a little, just a very little prejudiced about things; but you are so good and sweet-tempered that your prejudices never last long, and so your angel cannot help loving you a great deal.”

Mr. Port, who was not at all sweet-tempered at that moment, was prepared to reply to the first half of this speech in terms of some emphasis; for he was limping a little, and a shocking twinge took him in his left shoulder when he attempted to raise his arm. But Dorothy’s sudden shifting to polite personalities was of a nature to choke off his projected indignant utterance. Yet not feeling by any means prepared to meet in kind her pleasing manifestation of affection, Mr. Port was a little put to it to find any suitable form of response. After a moment’s reflection he abandoned the attempt to reply coherently, and contented himself with grunting.

VI.

Encouraged by the success that was attending her unselfish efforts to harmonize her own and her uncle’s conceptions of the temporal fitness of things, Miss Lee began to find life at the Pier quite supportable. “There’s not much to do here,” she declared, with her customary candor, “and the hotels–all ugly and all in a row–make it look like an overgrown charitable institution; and most of the people, I must say, are such a dismal lot that they might very well be the patients out for an airing. But, on the whole, I’ve been in several worse places, Uncle Hutchinson; and if only you’d take me to a hop now and then, instead of sitting every evening on the pokey hotel veranda talking Philadelphia twaddle with that stuffy old Mr. Pennington Brown, I might have rather a good time here.”

“You will oblige me, Dorothy,” replied Mr. Port, “by refraining from using such a word as ‘stuffy’ in connection with a gentleman who belongs to one of the oldest and best families in Philadelphia, and who, moreover, is one of my most esteemed friends.”

“But he is stuffy, Uncle Hutchinson. He never talks about anything but who peoples’ grandfathers and grandmothers were; and Watson’s Annals seems to be the only book that he ever has heard of. Indeed, I do truly think that he is the very stuffiest and stupidest old gentleman that I ever have known.”

Mr. Port made no reply to this sally, for his feelings were such that he deemed it best not to give expression to them in words; but he was not unnaturally surprised, after such a declaration of sentiments on the part of his niece, when she begged to be excused on the ensuing afternoon from her regular drive to the Point, on the ground that she had promised to make an expedition to the Rocks in Mr. Brown’s company. Had an opportunity been given him Mr. Port would have asked for an explanation of this phenomenon; but the carriage was in waiting that was to convey his ward and her extraordinary companion to the end of the road at Indian Rock–a slight rheumatic tendency, that he declared was hereditary, rendering it advisable for Mr. Brown to reduce the use of his legs to a minimum–and before Mr. Port could rally his forces they had entered it and had driven away.