filled with sudden tears, and her face was flushed with the shock. She
had seldom looked so well, so thoroughly awakened and mistress of her
faculties. When she was roused she had more in her than was apparent on
the surface. "I did not think you would be the one to tell us that. Of
course we know that it is quite true. Chatty and I are older than you
are, but we are only daughters, and you are the boy. You have the power
to turn us out,--we all know that."

"Minnie!" cried Chatty, struck with terror, putting out a hand to stop
these terrible words,--words such as had never been said in her hearing
before.

"But we did not think you would have used it," the elder sister said
simply, and then was silent. He expected that she would end the scene by
rushing from the room in tears and wrath. But what she did was much more
embarrassing. She dried her tears hastily, took up her crewel-work, sat
still, and said no more. Chatty threw an indignant but yet at the same
time an inquiring glance at him. She had not heard or observed the
beginning of the fray, and did not feel quite sure what it was all
about.

"I am sure Theo would never do anything that was unkind," she remarked
mildly; then after a little pause, "Wouldn't it have been much better to
have had the reading? I have noticed that before: when one reads and the
others work, there is, as the rector says, a common interest, and we
have a nice evening; but when we begin talking instead--well, we think
differently, and we disagree, and one says more than one means to say,
and then--one is sorry afterwards," Chatty said, after another pause.

On the whole, it was the girls who had the best of it in this encounter.
It is impossible to say how much Theo was ashamed of himself when, after
Chatty's quite unaccustomed address, which surprised herself as much
as her brother and sister, and after an hour of silence, broken by an
occasional observation, the girls put aside their crewels again, and
remarked that it was time to go to bed. A sense of opposition and
that pride which prevents a man from being the first to retire from a
battle-field, even when the battle is a failure and the main armies
have never engaged, had kept him there during the evening, in spite of
himself. But when they left him master of the ground, there can be no
doubt that he felt much more like a defeated than a triumphant general.
This first consequence of the new _regime_ was not a beautiful or
desirabl