“I have just popped in to make a little call on your sister,” she whispered; “but I saw she was pretty well loaded as she passed, and I did not wish to embarrass her—­I do not mind embarrassing you.  Don’t put down the bag, I beg.  I shall step into the drawing-room, and you can say I am there.  By the way, who is that young woman standing by the horse?”

“It is Miss Bannister,” answered Ralph, his face unreasonably flushing as he spoke.  “She is visiting Miriam and helping her.”

When Miss Panney wished to influence a person in favor of or against another person, she was accustomed to go about the business in a very circumspect way, and to accommodate the matter and the manner of her remarks to the disposition of the person addressed, and to the occasion.  She wished very much to influence Ralph in favor of Miss Bannister, and if she had had the opportunity of a conversation with him, she knew she could have done this in a very easy and natural way.  But there was no time for conversation now, and she might not again have the chance of seeing him alone, so she adopted a very different course, and with as much readiness and quickness as Daniel Boone would have put a rifle-ball into the head of an Indian the moment he saw it protrude from behind a tree, so did Miss Panney concentrate all she had to say into one shot, and deliver it quickly.

“Help Miriam, eh?” she whispered; “take my advice, my boy, and keep her to help you.”  And without another word she proceeded to the drawing-room, where she seated herself in the most comfortable chair.

Ralph stood still a minute with the bag on his shoulder.  He scarcely understood what had been said to him, but the words had been so well aimed and sent with such force that before he reached Miriam and the pantry his mind was illumined by the shining apparition of Dora as his partner and helpmate.  Two minutes before there had been no such apparition.  It is true that his mind had been filled with misty, cloudlike sensations, entirely new to it, but the words of the old lady had now condensed them into form.

When Miriam was informed of the visitor in the drawing-room, she frowned a little, and made up a queer face, and then, taking off her long apron, went to perform her duty as lady of the house.

Ralph returned to Dora, and as he looked at the girl who was patting the neck of the brown mare, she seemed to have changed, not because she was different from what she had been a few minutes before, but because he looked upon her differently.  As he approached, every word that she had spoken to him that day crowded into his memory.  The last thing she had said was that she would wait until he returned to her, and here she was, waiting.  When he spoke, his manner had lost the free-heartedness of a little while before; there was a slight diffidence in it.

Hearing that Miss Panney was in the house, Dora turned her bonnet downward, and she also frowned a little.