“Thank you very much.  I will trust you.  Be kind to him, and let me come and see him after awhile.  I don’t wish him ever to come into the house again.”

“The baggage-man has brought the trunks,” said Terry.

“Have them taken upstairs.  Would you like to go to your room, Miss Orme?”

“If you please, madam.”

“Then I must bid you good-bye,” said Mr. Roscoe, holding out his hand.

“Do you not live here?”

“Oh no!  I am only a student in my cousin’s law-office, but come here very often.  I hope the dog-war is amicably settled, but if hostilities are reopened, and you ever make up your mind to give Hero away, please remember that I am first candidate for his ownership.”

“I would almost as soon think of giving away my head.  Good-bye, sir.”

As she turned to follow the servant out of the room, she ran against a young lady who hastily entered, singing a bar from “Traviata.”

“Bless me!  I beg your pardon.  This is——­”

“Miss Orme; Erle’s ward.”

“Miss Orme does not appear supremely happy at the prospect of sojourning with us, beneath this hospitable roof.  Mamma, I understand you have had a regular Austerlitz battle over that magnificent dog I met in the hall,—­and alas! victory perched upon the standard of the invading enemy!  Cheer up, mamma! there is a patent medicine just advertised in the Herald that hunts down, worries, shakes, and strangles hydrophobia, as Gustave Billon’s Skye terrier does rats.  Good-morning, Mr. Elliott Roscoe!  Poor Miss Orme looks strikingly like a half-famished and wholly hopeless statue of Patience that I saw on a monument at the last funeral I attended in Greenwood.  Hattie, do take her to her room, and give her some hot chocolate, or coffee, or whatever she drinks.”

She had taken both the stranger’s hands, shook them rather roughly, and in conclusion pushed her toward the door.

Olga Neville was twenty-two, tall, finely formed, rather handsome; with unusually bright reddish-hazel eyes, and a profusion of tawny hair, which nine persons in ten would unhesitatingly have pronounced red, but which she persistently asserted was of exactly the classic shade of ruddy gold, that the Borgia gave to Bembo.  Her features were large, and somewhat irregular in contour, but her complexion was brilliant, her carriage very graceful, and though one might safely predict that at some distant day she would prove “fair, fat, and forty,” her full figure had not yet transgressed the laws of symmetry.

As the door of the sitting-room closed, she put her large white hands on her mother’s shoulders, shook her a little, and kissed her on the cheek.

“Do, mamma, let us have fair play, or I shall desert to the enemy.  It was not right to open your batteries on that little thing before she got well into position, and established her line.  If I am any judge of human nature, I rather guess from the set of her lips, and the stars that danced up and down in her eyes, that she is not quite as easily flanked as a pawn on a chessboard.”