Curtis."

"On the mutual aversion principle," murmured the brother.

"Don't you flatter yourself! Have you found out, Miss Curtis, that it is
the property of this species always to go by contraries?"

"To Miss Curtis I always appear in the meekest state of assent," said
Alick.

"Then I would not be Miss Curtis. How horribly you must differ!"

Rachel was absolutely silenced by this cross fire; something so unlike
the small talk of her experience, that her mind could hardly propel
itself into velocity enough to follow the rapid encounter of wits.
However, having stirred up her lightest troops into marching order,
she said, in a puzzled, doubtful way, "How has he prepared you to hate
us?--By praising us?"

"Oh, no; that would have been too much on the surface. He knew the
effect of that," looking in his sleepy eyes for a twinkle of response.
"No; his very reserve said, I am going to take her to ground too
transcendent for her to walk on, but if I say one word, I shall never
get her there at all. It was a deep refinement, you see, and he really
meant it, but I was deeper," and she shook her head at him.

"You are always trying which can go deepest?" said Rachel.

"It is a sweet fraternal sport," returned Alick.

"Have you no brother?" asked Bessie.

"No."

"Then you don't know what detestable creatures they are," but she
looked so lovingly and saucily at her big brother, that Rachel, spite of
herself, was absolutely fascinated by this novel form of endearment.
An answer was spared her by Miss Keith's rapture at the sight of some
soldiers in the uniform of her father's old regiment.

"Have a care, Bessie; Miss Curtis will despise you," said her brother.

"Why should you think so?" exclaimed Rachel, not desirous of putting on
a forbidding aspect to this bright creature.

"Have I not been withered by your scorn!"

"I--I--" Rachel was going to say something of her change of opinion with
regard to military society, but a sudden consciousness set her cheeks
in a flame and checked her tongue; while Bessie Keith, with ease and
readiness, filled up the blank.

"What, Alick, you have brought the service into disrepute! I am ashamed
of you!"

"Oh, no!" said Rachel, in spite of her intolerable blushes, feeling
the necessity of delivering her confession, like a cannon-ball among
skirmishers; "only we had been used to regard officers as necessarily
empty and frivolous, and our recent experience has--has been otherwis