and went upstairs, with no very angelic expression of
countenance.

"Pretty well for a beginning," was Hunt's muttered comment as he laid
down the paper.

At breakfast Mr. Gifford asked him:--

"Shall I give you some tongue?"

Looking around with the air of one saying a good thing, he replied:--

"Thank you, I have enough of my own."

The silence was painful. Mr. Gifford looked as if he had lost a near
friend. Mrs. Gifford at length, remembering that Hunt was a guest,
forced a momentary, ghastly smile. Annie was looking melancholy enough
before, but a slight compression of the lips indicated that she had
received the full effect. Certain degrees of badness in jokes stamp the
joker as a natural inferior in the eyes of even the most rabid of social
levelers. Scarcely any possible exhibition of depravity gives quite
the sickening sense of disappointment in the perpetrator imparted by a
genuinely bad or stale joke. Two or more similar sensations coming near
together are multiplied by mutual reverberations so as to be much more
impressive than if they occurred at considerable intervals. Hunt's
tongue joke not only retroacted to deepen the impression of vulgarity
which his last evening's performance had given Annie, but in turn was
made to appear a far more significant indication of his character on
account of its sequence to that display.

That evening he made her a little present, having selected as a gift
a book of the day of which he had chanced to overhear her express to a
third person a particularly cordial detestation. It was decidedly the
best book of the year, he said; he had read it himself. She was obliged
to thank him for it, and even to tell one or two polite fibs, which
wrenched her terribly, and the memory of which lent a special spite to
the vehemence with which she threw the book into a corner on reaching
her room. Then she went remorsefully and picked it up again, and after
holding it awhile irresolutely, proceeded to hide it away in a far
corner of one of the least used drawers of her bureau.

Not sleeping very well that night, she came downstairs next morning
just as Hunt was leaving. He kissed his hand to her and called out
"Aw revore." At first she was merely puzzled, and smiled, and then it
occurred to her that it was doubtless the barbarous way he pronounced
_au revoir_, and the smile gave place to an expression of slight nausea.
As Hunt well knew, her pet aversion was people who lugged mispro