sfavor of her father.

No matter how miserable she was in consequence of her acquiescence
with her father's will, she sternly persisted.

To-night she knew that Barnabas was waiting impatiently for her
signal to leave the rest of the company and go with her into the
front room; there was also a tender involuntary impatience and
longing in every nerve of her body, but nobody would have suspected
it; she sat there as calmly as if Barnabas were old Squire Payne, who
sometimes came in of a Sabbath evening, and seemed to be listening
intently to her mother and her Aunt Sylvia talking about the spring
cleaning.

Cephas and Barnabas were grimly silent. The young man suspected that
Cephas had prohibited the front room; he was indignant about that,
and the way in which Charlotte had been summoned in from the entry,
and he had no diplomacy.

Charlotte, under her calm exterior, grew uneasy; she glanced at her
mother, who glanced back. It was to both women as if they felt by
some subtle sense the brewing of a tempest. Charlotte unobtrusively
moved her chair a little nearer her lover's; her purple delaine skirt
swept his knee; both of them blushed and trembled with Cephas's black
eyes upon them.

Charlotte never knew quite how it began, but her father suddenly
flung out a dangerous topic like a long-argued bone of contention,
and he and Barnabas were upon it. Barnabas was a Democrat, and Cephas
was a Whig, and neither ever forgot it of the other. None of the
women fairly understood the point at issue; it was as if they drew
back their feminine skirts and listened amazed and trembling to this
male hubbub over something outside their province. Charlotte grew
paler and paler. She looked piteously at her mother.

"Now, father, don't," Sarah ventured once or twice, but it was like a
sparrow piping against the north wind.

Charlotte laid her hand on her lover's arm and kept it there, but he
did not seem to heed her. "Don't," she said; "don't, Barnabas. I
think there's going to be a frost to-night; don't you?" But nobody
heard her. Sylvia Crane, in the background, clutched the arms of her
rocking-chair with her thin hands.

Suddenly both men began hurling insulting epithets at each other.
Cephas sprang up, waving his right arm fiercely, and Barnabas shook
off Charlotte's hand and was on his feet.

"Get out of here!" shouted Cephas, in a hoarse voice--"get out of
here! Get out of this house, an' don't you ever darse darken these