e
subject.

"Yes, she is very well. What do you think they are going to name the
baby? Anne; after her mamma. So very ugly a name! Anne!"

"I do not think so," said Mr. Carlyle. "It is simple and unpretending,
I like it much. Look at the long, pretentious names of our
family--Archibald! Cornelia! And yours, too--Barbara! What a mouthful
they all are!"

Barbara contracted her eyebrows. It was equivalent to saying that he did
not like her name.

They reached the gate, and Mr. Carlyle was about to pass out of it when
Barbara laid her hand on his arm to detain him, and spoke in a timid
voice,--

"Archibald!"

"What is it?"

"I have not said a word of thanks to you for this," she said,
touching the chain and locket; "my tongue seemed tied. Do not deem me
ungrateful."

"You foolish girl! It is not worth them. There! Now I am paid.
Good-night, Barbara."

He had bent down and kissed her cheek, swung through the gate, laughing,
and strode away. "Don't say I never gave you anything," he turned his
head round to say, "Good-night."

All her veins were tingling, all her pulses beating; her heart was
throbbing with its sense of bliss. He had never kissed her, that she
could remember, since she was a child. And when she returned indoors,
her spirits were so extravagantly high that Mrs. Hare wondered.

"Ring for the lamp, Barbara, and you can get to your work. But don't
have the shutters closed; I like to look out on these light nights."

Barbara, however, did not get to her work; she also, perhaps, liked
"looking out on a light night," for she sat down at the window. She
was living the last half hour over again. "'Don't say I never gave you
anything,'" she murmured; "did he allude to the chain or to the--kiss?
Oh, Archibald, why don't you say that you love me?"

Mr. Carlyle had been all his life upon intimate terms with the Hare
family. His father's first wife--for the late lawyer Carlyle had been
twice married--had been a cousin of Justice Hare's, and this had caused
them to be much together. Archibald, the child of the second Mrs.
Carlyle, had alternately teased and petted Anne and Barbara Hare, boy
fashion. Sometimes he quarreled with the pretty little girls, sometimes
he caressed them, as he would have done had they been his sisters; and
he made no scruple of declaring publicly to the pair that Anne was his
favorite. A gentle, yielding girl she was, like her mother; whereas
Barbara displayed her own will, and it