ntly at the intruder. Miss Pilgrim
blushed violently, but turned away her head to avoid the exhibition of a
still more convulsing emotion than embarrassment.

"I must beg your pardon, Miss Pilgrim--and yours, too, Billy," began
Daniel in a hesitating way, hardly knowing how to treat the posture in
which he found things, "but--you see--the fact is the servant said she'd
go to announce me--and really when I came in, I hadn't any idea you were
here, or Billy either."

"Then," said Billy, moderating the defiant attitude, "you actually
weren't dodging around and trying to find out what Lottie and I were
about on the sly? Well, I'll believe you. I'm sure you couldn't be as
mean as that, when I'm the only brother you have got, that always brings
you oranges when you're sick, and never plays ball on the stairs when
you've got a headache. Now, then, I'll trust you, I've been asking
Lottie to marry me, and I want you to help me. Ask her if she won't,
Daniel--see if she won't do it for you!"

Miss Pilgrim had been trying to find words, but her face was too much
for her and she was obliged to seek retirement in her handkerchief. As
she drew it from her pocket, a well-worn piece of paper followed it and
fell upon the floor. Billy picked it up before she noticed it, and
was about to hand it to her, when his jealous eye fell upon a withered
rosebud sewed to its margin. As he looked at it, with his little
brows knit into a precocious sternness, he recognized his brother's
handwriting immediately beneath the flower. It was one of the daily
anonymous sonnets, of which Daniel had told me, and the bud a relic of
the bouquet accompanying it. Still Daniel was silent. What else could he
be?

"Very well, very well, Master Daniel!" exclaimed Billy, in a voice
trembling with grief and indignation, "there's good enough reason why
you won't speak a word for me. You want her yourself--here it is in your
own writing. No wonder you won't tell Lottie to be my wife, when you're
trying to take her away from me. Oh, Lottie, dear Lottie! I love you
just as much as he does, though I don't know everything and can't write
you poetry like it was out of the Fifth Reader! Daniel, how could you
go and write to my Lottie this way: 'My churner'--no, it isn't churner,
it's charmer,--'let me call thee mine'?"

Forgetting the sacredness of private MS. in that of private grief,
he would have gone on, with a pause here and there for certainty of
spelling, to the