Do not you like her the better for that, Mr. Haverley?"
Ralph did agree most heartily, and it made him happy to agree on any
subject with a girl who was even more beautiful by moonlight than by
day; who was so kind, and tended to his sister, and whose generous
disposition could overlook little breaches of etiquette when there was
reason to do so.
As they walked backward and forward, not very far away from the piazza,
and sometimes stopping to admire bits of the silver-tinted landscape,
Dora, with most interesting deftness, gave Ralph further opportunity of
knowing her. With his sister as a suggesting subject, she talked about
herself; she told him how she, too, had lost her parents early in life,
and had been obliged to be a very independent girl, for her stepmother,
although just as good as she could be, was not a person on whom she could
rely very much. As for her brother, the dearest man on earth, she had
always felt that she was more capable of taking care of him, at least in
all matters in home life, than he of her.
"But I have been very happy," she went on to say, "for I am so fond of
country life, and everything that belongs to it, that the more I have to
do with it, the better I like it, and I really begrudge the time that I
spend in the city.
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