“No, thank you.  I shall most likely drop off to sleep, and enjoy forty winks in this very comfortable chair.  Don’t be too harsh with the young man, Kate.  You are quite wrong in your surmises about him.  The Lieutenant never made any such arrangement as you suggest, because he talked of nothing but the most commonplace subjects all the time I was with him, as I was just about to tell you, only you seem in such a hurry to get away.”

“Oh, that doesn’t deceive me in the least.  I’ll be back shortly, with the young man’s scalp dangling at my belt.  Now we shan’t be long,” and with that Katherine went skipping downstairs.

Dorothy picked up a magazine that lay on the table, and for a few moments turned its leaves from one story to another, trying to interest herself, but failing.  Then she lifted the newspaper that lay at her feet, but it also was soon cast aside, and she leaned back in her chair with half-closed eyes, looking out at the cruiser in the Bay.  A slight haze arose between her and the ship, thickening and thickening until at last it obscured the vessel.

Dorothy was oppressed by a sense of something forgotten, and she strove in vain to remember what it was.  It was of the utmost importance, she was certain, and this knowledge made her mental anxiety the greater.

At last out of the gloom she saw Sabina approach, clothed in rags, and then a flash of intuition enabled her to grasp the difficulty.  Through her remissness the ball dress was unfinished, and the girl, springing to her feet, turned intuitively to the sewing-machine, when the ringing laugh of Katherine dissolved the fog.

“Why, you poor girl, what’s the matter with you?  Are you sitting down to drudgery again?  You’ve forgotten the fortune!”

“Are—­ are you back already?” cried Dorothy, somewhat wildly.

“Already!  Why, bless me, I’ve been away an hour and a quarter.  You dear girl, you’ve been asleep and in slavery again!”

“I think I was,” admitted Dorothy with a sigh.

CHAPTER VI

 From sea to mountain

Three days later the North Atlantic squadron of the British Navy sailed down the coast from Halifax, did not even pause at Bar Harbor, but sent a wireless telegram to the “Consternation,” which pulled up anchor and joined the fleet outside, and so the war-ships departed for another port.

Katherine stood by the broad window in the sewing room in her favorite attitude, her head sideways against the pane, her eyes languidly gazing upon the Bay, fingers drumming this time a very slow march on the window sill.  Dorothy sat in a rocking-chair, reading a letter for the second time.  There had been silence in the room for some minutes, accentuated rather than broken by the quiet drumming of the girl’s fingers on the window sill.  Finally Katherine breathed a deep sigh and murmured to herself: