? ? ? ? 'No blood-relation,' I replied; 'but we were brought up together, like brother and sister.'
? ? ? ? 'I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?' said Dora, beginning on another button of my coat.
? ? ? ? 'Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!'
? ? ? ? 'Suppose you had never seen me at all,' said Dora, going to another button.
? ? ? ? 'Suppose we had never been born!' said I, gaily.
? ? ? ? I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers. At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss - once, twice, three times - and went out of the room.
? ? ? ? They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then. She was laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his performances, before the coach came. They took some time (not so much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were still unfinished when it was heard at the door. There was a hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a second parting at the coach door, and a third when Dora, in spite of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once more to remind Agnes at the coach window about writing, and to shake her curls at me on the box.
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