ions reflected in each line, shade,
and color of the other's face. It was as if they had each confronted
their own passionate and willful souls, and were frightened. It had
often occurred before, always with the same invariable ending. The
young man's eyes lowered first; the girl's filled with tears.

"Well, ef ye didn't mean that, what did ye mean?" said Jim, sinking,
with sullen apology, back into his chair.

"I--only--meant it--for--for--revenge!" sobbed Maggie.

"Oh!" said Jim, as if allowing his higher nature to be touched by this
noble instinct. "But I didn't jest see where the revenge kem in."

"No? But, never mind now, Jim," said Maggie, ostentatiously ignoring,
after the fashion of her sex, the trouble she had provoked; "but to
think--that--that--you thought"--(sobbing).

"But I didn't, Mag"--(caressingly).

With this very vague and impotent conclusion, Maggie permitted herself
to be drawn beside her brother, and for a few moments they plumed each
other's ruffled feathers, and smoothed each other's lifted crests, like
two beautiful young specimens of that halcyon genus to which they were
popularly supposed to belong. At the end of half an hour Jim rose,
and, yawning slightly, said in a perfunctory way:

"Where's the book?"

The book in question was the Bible. It had been the self-imposed
custom of these two young people to read aloud a chapter every night as
their one vague formula of literary and religious discipline. When it
was produced, Maggie, presuming on his affectionate and penitential
condition, suggested that to-night he should pick out "suthin'
interestin'." But this unorthodox frivolity was sternly put aside by
Jim--albeit, by way of compromise, he agreed to "chance it," i. e.,
open its pages at random.

He did so. Generally he allowed himself a moment's judicious pause for
a certain chaste preliminary inspection necessary before reading aloud
to a girl. To-night he omitted that modest precaution, and in a
pleasant voice, which in reading was singularly free from colloquial
infelicities of pronunciation, began at once:

"'Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the
inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord, to
the help of the Lord against the mighty.'"

"Oh, you looked first," said Maggie.

"I didn't now--honest Injin! I just opened."

"Go on," said Maggie, eagerly shoving him and interposing her neck over
his shoulder.

An