the better for
them. Having put down her book, she rose from her chair; and as she
dipped the tips of her hands in water, and wiped them with elaborate
nicety, she talked to Charlotte in a soft, deliberate way.

"Where have you been, you and father, ever since daybreak?"

"Up to Blaeberry Tarn, and then home by Holler Beck. We caught a creel
full of trout, and had a very happy day."

"Really, you know?"

"Yes, really; why not?"

"I cannot understand it, Charlotte. I suppose we never were sisters
before." She said the words with the air of one who rather states a fact
than asks a question; and Charlotte, not at all comprehending, looked at
her curiously and interrogatively.

"I mean that our relationship in this life does not touch our anterior
lives."

"Oh, you know you are talking nonsense, Sophia! It gives me such a feel,
you can't tell, to think of having lived before; and I don't believe it.
There, now! Come, dear, let us go to dinner; I'm that hungry I'm fit to
drop." For Charlotte was watching, with a feeling of injury, Sophia's
leisurely method of putting every book and chair and hairpin in its
place.

The sisters' rooms were precisely alike in their general features, and
yet there was as great a relative difference in their apartments as in
their natures. Both were large, low rooms, facing the sunrise. The walls
of both were of dark oak; the roofs of both were of the same sombre
wood; so also were the floors. They were literally oak chambers. And in
both rooms the draperies of the beds, chairs, and windows were of white
dimity. But in Sophia's, there were many pictures, souvenirs of
girlhood's friendships, needlework, finished and unfinished drawings,
and a great number of books mostly on subjects not usually attractive to
young women. Charlotte's room had no pictures on its walls, and no odds
and ends of memorials; and as sewing was to her a duty and not a
pleasure, there was no crotcheting or Berlin-wool work in hand; and with
the exception of a handsome copy of "Izaak Walton," there were no books
on her table but a Bible, Book of Common Prayer, and a very shabby
Thomas a Kempis.

So dissimilar were the girls in their appearance and their tastes; and
yet they loved each other with that calm, habitual, family affection,
which, undemonstrative as it is, stands the wear and tug of life with a
wonderful tenacity. Down the broad, oak stairway they sauntered
together; Charlotte's tall, erect figure, brig