But look here, Em--"

"Amelie."

"This is carrying things too blamed far."

He was not entirely heedless of her own welfare. He had felt the
animosity and ridicule that had gathered like sultry electricity in the
atmosphere when Emma had murmured at the station those words that Orson
had not heard.

Orson, seated with Tudie at one end of the porch, heard them now at the
other end of the porch as they were quoted with mockery by Arthur. Orson
and Tudie forgot their own quarrel in the supernal rapture of
eavesdropping somebody's else wrangle.

"When you got off the train," Arthur groaned, "you knocked me off my
pins by what you said to your father and mother."

"And what did I say?" said Em in innocent wonder.

"You said, 'Oh, my dolling m'mah, I cahn't believe it's you'!"

"What was wrong with that?"

"You used to call her 'momma' and you called me 'darrling.' And you
wouldn't have dared to say 'cahn't'! When I heard you I wanted to die.
Then you grabbed your father and gurgled, 'Oh, p'pah, you deah old
angel!' I nearly dropped in my tracks, and so did your father. And then
you turned to me and I knew what was coming! I tried to stop you, but I
couldn't. And you said it! You called me 'Ahthuh'!"

"Isn't that your name, deah?"

"No, it is not! My name is 'Arrthurr' and you know it! 'Ahthuh'! what do
you think I am? My name is good honest 'Arrthurr.'" He said it like a
good honest watch-dog, and he gnarred the "r" in the manner that made
the ancients call it the canine letter.

Amelie, born Emma, laughed at his rage. She tried to appease him. "I
think 'Ahthuh' is prettiah. It expresses my tendah feelings bettah. The
way you say it, it sounds like garrgling something."

But her levity in such a crisis only excited her lover the more.
"Everybody at the station was laughing at you. To-night when you
traipsed down the stairs, looking so pretty in your new dress, you had
to spoil everything by saying: 'What a chahming pahty. Shall we dahnce,
Ahthuh?' I just wanted to die."

The victim of his tirade declined to wither. She answered: "I cahn't
tell you how sorry I am to have humiliated you. But if it's a sin to
speak correctly you'll have to get used to it."

"No, I won't; but you'll get over it. You can live it down in time; but
don't you dare try to change your name to Amelie. They'd laugh you out
of Carthage."

"Oh, would they now? Well, Amelie is my name for heahaftah, and if you
don't want to call me tha