After the manner of the country gentlemen who in mixed society are apt to prefer their own sex for purposes of converse, Herbert Bannister monopolized Ralph.  His sister talked with Cicely Drane, and in spite of her natural courage and the reasons for self-confidence which she had just received, Dora’s spirits steadily fell as she conversed with this merry, attractive girl, who knew so well how to make herself entertaining, even to other girls, and who was actually living in Ralph Haverley’s house.

Dora made the visit shorter than it otherwise would have been.  She had come, she had seen, and she wanted to go home and think about the rest of the business.  The drive home was, in a degree, pleasant because Herbert had a great deal to say about Mr. Haverley, whom he had found most agreeable, and because Mrs. Bannister spoke in praise of Ralph’s manly beauty, but it would depend upon future circumstances whether or not remarks of this kind could be considered entirely satisfactory.

That evening, in her own room, in a loose dressing-gown, and with her hair hanging over her shoulders, Dora devoted herself to an earnest consideration of her relations with Ralph Haverley.  At first sight it seemed odd that there should be any relations at all, for she had known him but a short time, and he had made few or no advances toward her—­not half so many or such pronounced ones as other men had made, during her few visits to fashionable resorts.  But she settled this part of the question very promptly.

“I like him better than anybody I have ever seen,” she said to herself.  “In fact, I love him, and now—­” and then she went on to consider the rest of the matter, which was not so easy to settle.

Cicely Drane was terribly hard to settle.  There was that girl,—­all the more dangerous because, being charming and little, a man would be more apt to treat her as a good comrade than if she were charming and tall,—­who was with him all the time.  And how she would be with him, Dora’s imagination readily perceived, because she knew how she herself would be with him under the circumstances.  Before breakfast in the dewy grass, gathering apples; during work hours, talking through the open window as he chanced to pass; after five o’clock, walks in the orchard, walks over the farm, in the woods everywhere, and always those two together, because there were four of them.  How much worse it was that there were four of them!  And the evenings, moonlight, starlight; on the piazza; good-night on the stairs—­it was maddening to think of.

But, nevertheless, she thought of it hour after hour, with no other result than to become more and more convinced that she was truly in love with a man who had never given any sign that he loved her, and that there was every reason to believe that when he gave a sign that he loved, it would be to another woman, and not to her.

She rose and looked out of the window.  A piece of the moon, far gone in the third quarter, was rising above a mass of evergreens.  She had a courageous young soul, and the waning brightness of the lovers’ orb did not affect her as a disheartening sign.