“My good child, if you attempt to marry either of them, I shall come and forbid the banns.”

Dorinda evinced a frank interest.

“How do you do it?”

“I’ve no idea, but I shall make it my business to find out. You’d better stiffen the backbone and practise saying no for five minutes every morning in front of the looking-glass. You can’t marry everyone who asks you.”

“Nobody has except Tip-not really. Buzzer just said he couldn’t-not until he got a proper job, but would I wait for him. I don’t know if you’d count that or not.”

“I shouldn’t count either of them. Look here, will you promise me something?”

Dorinda possessed a vein of caution. It prompted her to ask,

“What is it?”

“Don’t get engaged to anyone without asking me. And don’t be in a hurry. Generally speaking, I should say the idea is not to get engaged unless you mean to get married, and not to get married unless you feel you must. Didn’t your Aunt Mary ever tell you that?” There was a slight quizzical smile in his eyes.

Dorinda said candidly, “She told me never to get married at all. You see, she had a complex about men. Because of the Wicked Uncle.”

“I never met your Aunt Mary, but she sounds a most unpleasant woman.”

Dorinda did her duty by the dead.

“Oh, she wasn’t really. It was frightfully good of her to bring me up, you know. Nobody else wanted to, but she thought it was her duty and she did. I was only two, and I must have been a lot of trouble.”

If Justin had a softened thought of Dorinda at two, smilingly unconscious of being a nuisance, he showed no sign of it. He simply disliked the late Mrs. Porteous a little more.