“Oh, Jule—­wait!—­I—­”

“All right!  I’ll telephone down for the seats.  Good-bye!”

He was on the vestibuled platform of his car to meet her when his train passed the home city from whose suburbs she had come in.  His eager eye fell delightedly on the trimly modish figure his sister presented; he would be proud to take her back into his car.  He knew just how two or three sleepy fellows of his own age, in chairs near his own, would sit up when they saw him return with this radiant girl.  Dot certainly knew how to get herself up, he reflected, as he had often done before.

It was April and it was “raining cats and dogs” as Dorothy came aboard, but the blue rainproof serge of her beautifully fitting suit was little the worse therefor, and the close little black hat with the fetching feather was one to defy the elements, be they never so wildly springlike.

“You’re a good sport!” was Julius’s low-pitched greeting as he kissed her, the tail of his eye on one of his young fellow-passengers who had followed him to the platform for a breath of fresh air and stood with his hands in his pockets staring at the pretty girl close by.

“I feel like a buccaneer—­or a pirate—­or something very bold and wild and adventurous,” she returned.

“You don’t look it—­except in your eye.  I think I do see there the gleam of a desperate resolve.”  He bent over her devotedly as he put her in her chair, noting the effect on the young gentlemen who had been too slothful to leave the car, but who now, as he had predicted to himself, were “sitting up,” both physically and mentally, as they covertly eyed his new travelling companion.  “I admit it takes courage for a New England girl to start out to meet a barbarian from the wilds of South America, unchaperoned except by a perfectly good brother.”

“If I could be sure the brother would be perfectly good—­” she suggested, smiling at him as she slightly altered the position of her chair so that the attentive fellow-travellers were moved out of her line of vision.

“I’m sworn to rigorous virtue,” he replied solemnly.  “He attended to that for you.”

Dorothy looked out of the window.  She looked out of the window most of the way to Boston, so that the interested youths opposite were able to enjoy only the averted line of her profile.

Julius, however, took delight in playing the lover for their benefit, and his attention to his sister would have deceived the elect.  The result was a considerably heightened colour in Dot’s face, which added the last touch of charm to the picture and completed her brother’s satisfaction.

Arrived in the city, Broughton treated his sister to a delicious little dinner at a favourite hotel, which he himself relished to the full.  He questioned whether she knew what she was eating or its quality, but she maintained an appearance of composure which only herself knew was attained at a cost.