“Well, I can’t have you breaking down!” cried her mother warningly:  she really wished to shake her, as a culmination of her own conflicting emotions.  “Alice, stop this instant!  Stop it, I say!”

“But if I don’t like her?” whimpered Alice.

“You’re not going to marry her.  Now stop!  Here, bathe your eyes; they’re all red.  Though I don’t know that it matters.  Yes, they’ll expect you to have been crying,” said Mrs. Pasmer, seeing the situation more and more clearly.  “It’s perfectly natural.”  But she took some cologne on a handkerchief, and recomposed Alice’s countenance for her.  “There, the colour becomes you, and I never saw your eyes look so bright.”

There was a pathos in their brilliancy which of course betrayed her to the Mavering girls.  It softened Eunice, and encouraged Minnie, who had been a little afraid of the Pasmers.  They both kissed Alice with sisterly affection.  Their father merely saw how handsome she looked, and Dan’s heart seemed to melt in his breast with tenderness.

In recognition of the different habits of their guests, they had dinner instead of tea.  The Portuguese cook had outdone himself, and course followed course in triumphal succession.  Mrs. Pasmer praised it all with a sincerity that took away a little of the zest she felt in making flattering speeches.

Everything about the table was perfect, but in a man’s fashion, like the rest of the house.  It lacked the atmospheric charm, the otherwise indefinable grace, which a woman’s taste gives.  It was in fact Elbridge Mavering’s taste which had characterised the whole; the daughters simply accepted and approved.

“Yes,” said Eunice, “we haven’t much else to do; so we eat.  And Joe does his best to spoil us.”

“Joe?”

“Joe’s the cook.  All Portuguese cooks are Joe.”

“How very amusing!” said Mrs. Pasmer.  “You must let me speak of your grapes.  I never saw anything so—­well!—­except your roses.”

“There you touched father in two tender spots.  He cultivates both.”

“Really?  Alice, did you ever see anything like these roses?”

Alice looked away from Dan a moment, and blushed to find that she had been looking so long at him.

“Ah, I have,” said Mavering gallantly.

“Does he often do it?” asked Mrs. Pasmer, in an obvious aside to Eunice.

Dan answered for him.  “He never had such a chance before.”

Between coffee, which they drank at table, and tea, which they were to take in Mrs. Mavering’s room, they acted upon a suggestion from Eunice that her father should show Mrs. Pasmer his rose-house.  At one end of the dining-room was a little apse of glass full of flowering plants growing out of the ground, and with a delicate fountain tinkling in their midst.  Dan ran before the rest, and opened two glass doors in the further side of this half-bubble, and at the same time with a touch flashed up a succession