Miss Fanny having settled this, and upon farther acquaintance with Mr. Dinks having discovered that she might as well undertake the matrimonial management of him as of any other man, and that the Burt fortune would probably descend, in part at least, to the youth Alfred, she decided that the youth Alfred must marry her.

But how should Hope Wayne be disposed of?  Fanny reflected.

She lived in Delafield.  Brother Abel, now nearly nineteen—­not a childish youth—­not unhandsome—­not too modest—­lived also in Delafield.  Had he ever met Hope Wayne?

By skillful correspondence, alluding to the solitude of the country, et cetera, and his natural wish for society, and what pleasant people were there in Delafield, Fanny had drawn her lines around Abel to carry the fact of his acquaintance, if possible, by pure strategy.

In reply, Abel wrote about many things—­about Mrs. Kingo and Miss Broadbraid—­the Sutlers and Grabeaus—­he praised the peaceful tone of rural society, and begged Fanny to beware of city dissipation; but not a word of old Burt and Hope Wayne.

Sister Fanny wrote again in the most confiding manner.  Brother Abel replied in a letter of beautiful sentiments and a quotation from Dr. Peewee.

He overdid it a little, as we sometimes do in this world.  We appear so intensely unconscious that it is perfectly evident we know that somebody is looking at us.  So Fanny, knowing that Christopher Burt was the richest man in the village, and lived in a beautiful place, and that his lovely grand-daughter lived with him constantly, with which information in detail Alfred Dinks supplied her, and perceiving from Abel’s letter that he was not a recluse, but knew the society of the village, arrived very naturally and easily at the conclusion that brother Abel did know Hope Wayne, and was in love with her.  She inferred the latter from the fact that she had long ago decided that brother Abel would not fall in love with any poor girl, and therefore she was sure that if he were in the immediate neighborhood of a lady at once young, beautiful, of good family and very rich, he would be immediately in love—­very much in love.

To make every thing sure, Abel had not been at home half an hour before Fanny’s well-directed allusion to Hope as the future Mrs. Dinks had caused her brother to indicate an interest which revealed every thing.

“If now,” pondered Miss Fanny, “somebody who shall be nameless becomes Mrs. Alfred Dinks, and the nameless somebody’s brother marries Miss Hope Wayne, what becomes of the Burt property?”