“Love me little, love me long,
          Is the burthen of my song,
          Love that is too hot and strong
          Runneth soon to waste.”

That simple air, already mellowed by an hundred years, had always been her favourite.  She used to sing it softly to herself as we roamed the woods and fields of the Eastern Shore.  Instinctively I paused at the dressing-room door.  Nay, my dears, you need not cry out, such was the custom of the times.  A dainty bower it was, filled with the perfume of flowers, and rosy cupids disporting on the ceiling; and china and silver and gold filigree strewn about, with my tea-cups on the table.  The sunlight fell like a halo round Dorothy’s head, her hands strayed over the keys, and her eyes were far away.  She had not heard me.  I remember her dress,—­a silk with blue cornflowers on a light ground, and the flimsiest of lace caps resting on her hair.  I thought her face paler; but beyond that she did not show her illness.

She looked up, and perceived me, I thought, with a start.  “So it is you!” she said demurely enough; “you are come at last to give an account of yourself.”

“Are you better, Dorothy?” I asked earnestly.

“Why should you think that I have been ill?” she replied, her fingers going back to the spinet.  “It is a mistake, sir.  Dr. James has given me near a gross of his infamous powders, and is now exploiting another cure.  I have been resting from the fatigues of London, while you have been wearing yourself out.”

“Dr. James himself told me your condition was serious,” I said.

“Of course,” said she; “the worse the disease, the more remarkable the cure, the more sought after the physician.  When will you get over your provincial simplicity?”

I saw there was nothing to be got out of her while in this baffling humour.  I wondered what devil impelled a woman to write one way and talk another.  In her note to me she had confessed her illness.  The words I had formed to say to her were tied on my tongue.  But on the whole I congratulated myself.  She knew how to step better than I, and there were many awkward things between us of late best not spoken of.  But she kept me standing an unconscionable time without a word, which on the whole was cruelty, while she played over some of Dibdin’s ballads.

“Are you in a hurry, sir,” she asked at length, turning on me with a smile, “are you in a hurry to join my Lord March or his Grace of Grafton?  And have you writ Captain Clapsaddle and your Whig friends at home of your new intimacies, of Mr. Fox and my Lord Sandwich?”

I was dumb.