After my prolonged scrutiny Dorothy lowered her face and said laughingly:--
"Now come, cousin, tell me the truth. Who would have thought it possible?"
"Not I, Doll, not I, if you will pardon me the frankness."
"Oh, that is easily done." Then with a merry ripple of laughter, "It is much easier, I fancy, for a woman to speak of the time when she was plain than to refer to the time when--when she was beautiful. What an absurd speech that is for me to make," she said confusedly.
"I certainly did not expect to find so great a change," said I. "Why, Doll, you are wondrous, glorious, beautiful. I can't find words--"
"Then don't try, Cousin Malcolm," she said with a smile that fringed her mouth in dimples. "Don't try. You will make me vain."
"You are that already, Doll," I answered, to tease her.
"I fear I am, cousin--vain as a man. But don't call me Doll. I am tall enough to be called Dorothy."
She straightened herself up to her full height, and stepping close to my side, said: "I am as tall as you. I will now try to make you vain. You look just as young and as handsome as when I last saw you and so ardently admired your waving black mustachio and your curling chin beard."
"Did you admire them, Doll--Dorothy?" I asked, hoping, though with little faith, that the admiration might still continue.
"Oh, prodigiously," she answered with unassuring candor. "Prodigiously. Now who is vain, Cousin Malcolm François de Lorraine Vernon?"
"I," I responded, shrugging my shoulders and confessing by compulsion.
"But you must remember," she continued provokingly, "that a girl of twelve is very immature in her judgment and will fall in love with any man who allows her to look upon him twice."
"Then I am to believe that the fire begins very early to burn in the feminine heart," I responded.
"With birth, my cousin, with birth," she replied; "but in my heart it burned itself out upon your curling beard at the mature age of twelve."
"And you have never been in love since that time, Doll--Dorothy?" I asked with more earnestness in my heart than in my voice.
"No, no; by the Virgin, no! Not even in the shadow of a thought. And by the help of the Virgin I hope I never shall be; for when it comes to me, mark my word, cousin, there will be trouble in Derbyshire."