self, if you like!"

This snappishness amazed and wounded the young man. He said:

"Rosannah, that was not like you."

"I suppose it becomes me as much as your very polite speech became you,
Mr. Fitz Clarence."

"Mister Fitz Clarence! Rosannah, there was nothing impolite about my
speech."

"Oh, indeed! Of course, then, I misunderstood you, and I most humbly
beg your pardon, ha-ha-ha! No doubt you said, 'Don't sing it any more
to-day.'"

"Sing what any more to-day?"

"The song you mentioned, of course, How very obtuse we are, all of a
sudden!"

"I never mentioned any song."

"Oh, you didn't?"

"No, I didn't!"

"I am compelled to remark that you did."

"And I am obliged to reiterate that I didn't."

"A second rudeness! That is sufficient, sir. I will never forgive you.
All is over between us."

Then came a muffled sound of crying. Alonzo hastened to say:

"Oh, Rosannah, unsay those words! There is some dreadful mystery here,
some hideous mistake. I am utterly earnest and sincere when I say I
never said anything about any song. I would not hurt you for the whole
world.... Rosannah, dear speak to me, won't you?"

There was a pause; then Alonzo heard the girl's sobbings retreating,
and knew she had gone from the telephone. He rose with a heavy sigh, and
hastened from the room, saying to himself, "I will ransack the charity
missions and the haunts of the poor for my mother. She will persuade her
that I never meant to wound her."

A minute later the Reverend was crouching over the telephone like a cat
that knoweth the ways of the prey. He had not very many minutes to wait.
A soft, repentant voice, tremulous with tears, said:

"Alonzo, dear, I have been wrong. You could not have said so cruel a
thing. It must have been some one who imitated your voice in malice or
in jest."

The Reverend coldly answered, in Alonzo's tones:

"You have said all was over between us. So let it be. I spurn your
proffered repentance, and despise it!"

Then he departed, radiant with fiendish triumph, to return no more with
his imaginary telephonic invention forever.

Four hours afterward Alonzo arrived with his mother from her favorite
haunts of poverty and vice. They summoned the San Francisco household;
but there was no reply. They waited, and continued to wait, upon the
voiceless telephone.

At length, when it was sunset in San Francisco, and three hours and
a half after dark in Eastport, an answer to the oft-repeate